Marketing to Children

I stayed home from work to get well yesterday. I am rarely home on a Saturday. Saturday morning TV is a lot different than I remember it. As kid, I used to look forward to Saturday mornings. By the time I was nine, I had things to do like mowing the lawn and mowing the neighbors lawn and other chores, but I tried my best to get those pesky things out of the way at other times so that I could have my Saturday mornings free. Why? Because I wanted to watch cartoons. I could go out and play baseball and stuff later, but I wanted to watch "The Jetsons". They were for fun and amusement. After that I would turn to the serious drama--like "Johnny Quest". Hey, I had my priorities.

Some forty years later, I still remember many of the commercial products that I used to see advertised while watching those programs. Johnny Quest for example, used to tell me that "PF Flier" tennis shoes would help me to run faster and jump higher. That was it. I had to have a pair. (Hey. I was a chubby kid and almost everybody could run faster than me at that time. You take your edges where you find them.) I don't remember if I nagged parents for a pair. I do remember however, my father telling me that I must know that the claims were bogus. I wanted them anyway and my folks acquiesced. I wore them out pretty fast. All that running and jumping, I guess.

I have been watching, and it seems that kids still want things that they see advertised. What a shocker. I'm glad I was a kid when I was and not now. There is no telling what I might want to have, or how much I might bug my folks to attain what I would want. I'm trying to remember if companies were even allowed to aim advertisements at kids as much as they do now. They probably were, but there are different things to sell these days. That last statement probably pegs me as the captain of Geezerville, but the truth is that we didn't have PCs or interactive role-playing video games or MP3 players when I was growing up.

It's shocking to me just how heavily bombarded today's kids are by advertisers for the companies that are trying to reach them and their disposable dollars, or those of their parents. Just the fast food company ads aimed at kids alone is shocking. Every big movie that comes out (and most are not suitable for young children) seems to get contracted for advertising to sell products by fast food chains. "Get some fries, and while you're at it---buy into our agenda film. Get enough of our product and we'll sell you a cheesy toy modeled after characters in the movie."

That's the least of it though. If you watch carefully, these advertisers aren't just looking to merely sell kids a toy these days. They are selling them products that have much more far-reaching consequences in their lives. They aren't just telling a chubby kid he'll be able to run faster and jump higher. They aren't just telling kids that they can have loads of fun with a "slinky". (I still own one.) Their marketing strategies are aimed at changing a child's mindset by altering their world paradigm. They study their target market. They study little kids intensely. Does anyone else find that disturbing? I mean, child predators do some of these things the very same way. I hope that sounds as harsh a comparison as I mean it to.

Every so often, before pushing a political agenda, you will hear activists say things like "Children are our most precious resource." Advertisers don't even have that much integrity. They make no such recognition or distinction in pursuing their goals. The result is a three-hundred-sixty degree assault on the child's reality and the way that they view it--and this begins happening very early in the child's development. If I had a child who was became the shallow kind of consumer that these big companies evidently would like him or her to be....I think I would weep my nights away.

So what is to be done? Parents...are you seeing what your children are seeing? Are you allowing them to watch programming unsupervised, where they get immersed in colorful, attractive, musical and happy-sounding outreaches through other kids who are telling them what they need? No? Try watching for just a few hours. Get out a pad and pen. Write down what you recognize as aimed at your child and what the goal of that aim is. It might surprise you.

Take charge of what they see if you want to help them to walk in godliness. Take parental control. Give them the feed that you want them to have. That's still your right. Don't allow your kids to be objectified. They're your kids.