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Joel Bakans 2004 best seller The Corporation was a big impact book and became a blockbuster documentary film that captured a Canadian Genie Award and 25 international prizes. It was, in many ways, a shocking book effectively exposing the insidious evils of corporate influence in our everyday lives. If the modern corporation was human, Bakan claimed, it would be a certifiable psychopath. After garnering Sundance Film Awards and a surprisingly positive review in the Economist, the author-turned-filmmaker dined out on the project for years.

In his sequel, Childhood Under Siege: How Big Business Targets Children, Bakan attempts to extend his now familiar thesis into the realm of childhood. As a committed social progressive, he sees himself as a concerned parent with two impressionable children of his own called into action to protect our kids from the faceless, soulless, rapacious corporation.

Bakans latest offering is sure to stir the passions, but the now overworked thesis sounds curiously simplistic when applied to dominant trends in child development and family life. Since its publication, the book has attracted mostly favourable attention, particularly on CBC Radio and TV, where the Michigan-born UBC law professor is often treated as a popular media personality.

Todays Canadian parents and families may not be so quick to swallow Bakans sweeping interpretation of their situation. When looking for guidance, they are more likely to find the answers in Carl Honores more compelling 2008 book Under Pressure: How the Epidemic of Hyper-Parenting is Endangering Childhood. It covers the same territory, offering a far more complex, multi-layered analysis and reaching radically different conclusions.

In Childhood Under Siege, parents and children are depicted as innocents who represent easy prey for the corporation. From the outset, Bakan comes off as a rather naive and protective parent who is startled to discover that his 11-year-old sons really cool Internet games site is a gateway to such appalling kiddie fare as Whack Your Soul Mate and Boneless Girl. That horrible revelation, according to the author, is really what prompted him to resume his war against corporate influence in North American life.

Bakan goes on to chronicle how big business targets and exploits children in a multitude of subtle and under-handed ways. It has happened, he claims, because of governments failure to intervene, allowing child protection laws to erode and giving free reign to corporations and their heartless, money-driven marketers.

For todays kids, Bakan shows that its a dangerous world out there. Spending hours and hours online exposes them to cyberworlds and social media which feed teenage narcissism and promote deranged, highly competitive and unhealthy values. Relentlessly targeted by red-haired clowns (McDonalds) and hipster icons (Starbucks), they come to pester their parents for fast food, junk snacks, and sugary, high-voltage drinks.

Sections of the book do deliver a profoundly important message. Bakan is at his best when exposing what is termed Big Pharma. Here his overarching thesis hits closer to the mark. In many cases, big pharmaceutical companies have not only smothered negative scientific studies but also co-opted medical professionals to create a popular culture where drugs solve everything and where kids actually label themselves ADHD before being seen by a doctor.

Bakans litany of sins perpetuated by big businesses knows few limits. Its the corporations that pollute the childs playroom environment with toxins, turn a blind eye to noxious gases, exploit child labour and promote market-driven reforms in public education.

Paying more attention to the history of childhood would have yielded deeper insights into the cyclical pattern of exaggerated parental worries, including the supposed corrupting influence of such blights as 19th century dime novels, The Simpsons and South Park.

Though the book tends to focus on the United States, Bakan tries to demonstrate that Canadian children are also being victimized in similar fashion. He knows the law and effectively documents the holes in child protection laws in Canada as in the US

Raising red flags about creeping corporate influence in Canadian public education through privately managed charter schools, standardized testing and rampant commercialization simply does not wash.

Thoughtful critics have already begun to dismiss Childhood Under Siege as a sincere, well-intended book that falls short of expectations. While The Corporation was very convincing in exposing the extent of corporate influence, the sequel runs aground in the complex, multi-faceted realm of childhood, parenting, and family life.

Bakans Childhood Under Siege is what is often labelled an important book. Written to raise public alarm, it may well come to exert quite a different influence. The British daily morning newspaper, The Independent, noted that the book should probably come with a health warning. Why? Because, somewhat ironically, it has the potential to further panic the current generation of parents, turning the odd one into what the The Independent reviewer described as a paranoid, overprotective nutcase.

Paul W. Bennett is the author of Vanishing Schools, Threatened Communities: The Contested Schoolhouse in Maritime Canada, 1850-2010.