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Mothers Union is a worldwide Christian organisation with almost 4 million members in 76 countries. Membership is open to anyone who has been baptised and who agrees with the Aim & Objectives of the Mothers Union, so our membership includes men and women, young or old, married or single, parent or not. Despite our worldwide strength and representation at global level, we are also a grassroots organisation, hence the phrase that Mothers Union is around the world, and around the corner.
On these pages you can learn more about Mothers' Union, both worldwide and here in the Diocese of York. If you would like to receive email notification of updates to this site, please use this link to join our mailing list
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The Commercialisation of Childhood:
a conference
Saturday 25 October 2008
The Parish Room, Minster Yard North, Beverley
(11.00am until 3.30pm: registration & coffee from 10.00am)
Principal Speaker: Jennifer Coton
Social Policy Research Assistant
The Mothers' Union
This conference has been arranged by the Archdeaconry of The East Riding and is open to anyone with a professional or personal concern about the commercialisation of childhood. Delegates will be invited to share their views and, hopefully, their solutions to this increasingly worrying aspect of modern society.
Dr Rowan Williams, our Archbishop of Canterbury, has said that 'A whole generation of "infant adults" is being created' by the commercialisation and premature sexualisation of children. A recent report 'details the intensity and effects of advertising to children. It reveals an army of marketing experts and branding gurus spending billions every year to directly target children to sell products and groom them for a lifetime of consumerism. They are inventing ever more ingenious ways of infiltrating children's worlds, subverting parents and families and exploiting children's emotional vulnerabilities in the name of profit. The report argues that engulfed with images of how they should look and be and what they should own and eat, children struggle to keep up resulting in increasing rates of stress, depression and low self-esteem and all time high rates of health problems like obesity in children.'
The Archdeaconry of The East Riding has set up a day conference to consider these issues, to equip parents and children's/youth workers to address and deal with the issues, and to seek ways to take wider action to influence government and wider society. Admission will be free. For details of how to get tickets please go to this page.
And please pass on this invitation to anyone who has a professional or a personal concern about the commercialisation of childhood.