Advertising and The Child

Comment: Trouble with TV is that no one really knows how to turn it off. Most people will actually walk out of a room rather than turn off the TV.

The Culture Beat

By: Jim

Children learn so quickly.

For example, there was a family car trip when our daughters were still in the car-seat stage, almost 20 years ago. We were in Indiana when we saw a familiar sign a few miles in the distance, towering over the plains. One of the girls called out: “Don-don! Don-don!”

She couldn’t say “McDonald’s” yet.

We didn’t go to the world’s best-known fast-food restaurant very often – honest – but it’s difficult for anyone to avoid, what with clowns and Happy Meals around every corner.

There’s some comfort in knowing it’s not just us. A study in this month’s Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine reports that preschoolers think anything tastes better if it’s wrapped in McDonald’s packaging, even if it wasn’t made there.

“The study had youngsters sample identical McDonald’s foods in name-brand and unmarked wrappers,” the Associated Press summarized this week. “The unmarked foods always lost the taste test. Even carrots, milk and apple juice tasted better to the kids when they were wrapped in the familiar packaging of the Golden Arches.”

It’s not McDonald’s fault, really. That company is just a very big fish swimming in an ocean of marketing. The study does raise serious questions about the impact of mass media, however, especially on the youngest members of our society.

“Kids see between 20,000 and 40,000 advertisements a year, depending on which report you look at,” according to Dr. Joy Drinnon, a Milligan College psychology professor who teaches a course on media and children. “Preschoolers are especially vulnerable to ads because children don’t consistently recognize the intention of ads to sell them something until the age of 7.” Half of kindergarteners in one study said that ads always tell the truth.

Most ads aimed at children come on a screen, whether it’s TV, computer or cell phone, and children up to age 18 spend about five hours a day on “screen time.” Children under 7 spend about two hours a day in front of screens. That’s lot of time in the short life of a child.

“The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no TV for children under the age of 2, and less than two hours a day of educational TV for all other children,” Drinnon said, and yet more than one-third of American children under 6, 35 percent, have a TV in their room.

The physical and financial impact of such a media monster is already obvious: children are more obese than ever, and kids spend and influence parents’ spending to the tune of about $600 billion per year. That’s just the start.

“Children watching four or five hours of screen time per day means they can’t be getting a lot good things for their development,” said Dr. Rebecca Isbell, professor of early childhood education and director of the Center of Excellence in Early Childhood Learning and Development at East Tennessee State University. “They’re not getting physical activity, not playing, not being read to, not participating with other children – all the things that are healthy for them are not happening. They’re just blanking out.”

This new “McDonald’s study” is significant, Isbell said, because it indicates that the impact of mass media and marketing is hitting younger and younger.

Isbell, who writes a regular column for “ParentLife,” a Southern Baptist magazine, said media not only can affect children’s development, but mass marketing can influence how children view the world and themselves.

For instance, she’s concerned that a current retailing trend – separating toys by gender on the shelves of toy stores – can lead children to think that girls should think mostly about dressing up and boys should think mostly about action.

“Advertising is shaping the kinds of things children experience,” she explained, “and no doubt these experiences shape perceptions later in life. Children may not remember them, but they’re stored in the brain.”

So if advertising can affect anything from a child’s taste in food to attitudes about gender, could it have an impact on his or her ideas about God, about what we consider spiritual matters? Academic research is thin on the topic, as Isbell points out, and there aren’t any firm answers.

But it seems like a question worth asking. When a child says a prayer of thanks for her food, will she think that God looks like Ronald McDonald?

This column was first published in the Johnson City (Tenn.) Press on 11 August 2007.
Image from Gewista Urban Media (Austria) .

Date: August 11, 2007