Today in the mail my 14 year old daughter received a mailing from National American Miss inviting her to “audition” for their pageant. My daughter is pretty, and I suppose getting a piece of mail like this is flattering.
Except. I wonder how they got her name and address in the first place. My children do not attend traditional school, as we are homeschoolers and have been for five years. So a school could not have sold their mailing address to anyone. My daughter doesn’t have bills or bank accounts in her name, is not old enough to register to vote or get a driving permit or anything else that might have her name and address. The only thing I can trace it back to is that she does have a state-issued ID for traveling, and she has her own library card. Which one of these two entities is likely selling information to marketers? I just don’t see either one doing that, but maybe I’m misguided.
It also occurs to me that my 18 year old son, now a college student, has been receiving recruiting materials from the armed forces for about three years now. He was also homeschooled for the last five years, so I’m having trouble figuring out where that mail is coming from. He has a state-issued ID, a library card, and a savings account at a local bank. He is also employed. So I have several other ideas about how he got on someone’s mailing list.
Getting junk mail at this age does concern me. Junk snail mail for kids is really pretty inappropriate, in my book. The marketing never stops, virtually from birth on. It is on television, radio, peer pressure from their friends, magazines, books, you name it. Even our kids aren’t safe from the pervasive attitude of buy buy buy. It’s a strange thing.
It makes me wonder when my six year old will see her first piece of junk mail.