The High Cost Of Marketing

Selling to kids has been recognized as treachery since the 1970s, simply because using moving images and blinking lights to get grade-schoolers thinking about toys, food, and TV shows is like hunting cattle with rocket launchers. It's why you can't advertise to kids in Norway and Sweden, and why Canada, Greece, and other European countries have severe restrictions. Kids today may seem more media savvy than in the past, but their familiarity with brands only masks the immaturity of their young brains. "Developmentally, children under the age of 7 or 8 are incapable of discerning persuasive intent," Rich says. "As a result, the American Psychological Association has stated it is unethical to advertise to children younger than 8."

Researchers have learned that marketing is bad for kids on nearly every measure of well-being. Children's TV ads, websites, and video games are dominated by pitches for candy, soda, and fast food to the tune of $10 billion to $15 billion annually, and research shows that these ads work: Kids as young as 2 ask for foods they've seen advertised on TV. Even after adjusting for age, BMI, total energy intake, TV viewing, and physical activity, for every hour of TV or video viewing, adolescents' odds of eating foods commonly advertised on television increased, according to a 2006 study from the Harvard School of Public Health. "Statistically, there is strong evidence that exposure to television advertising is associated with [obesity] in children ages 2 to 11 and teens ages 12 to 18," concluded a recent National Academy of Sciences report titled "Food Marketing to Children and Youth: Threat or Opportunity?"

Marketing especially hurts girls. The American Psychological Association recently convened a task force that found that the proliferation of sexualized images of girls in advertising, merchandising, and the media is causing real problems. "We have ample evidence to conclude that sexualization has negative effects on cognitive function, physical and mental health, and healthy sexual development," says Eileen L. Zurbriggen, Ph. D., a coauthor of the task force's report and a professor of psychology at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

The consequences for all children go beyond obesity and body-image issues. Start with licensing. Marketers have successfully trained kids to play with brands, not toys--and researchers are just beginning to understand why this is scary. Children need generic, unbranded toys in order to best express themselves, explains Susan Linn, Ed. D., head of the influential Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood and author of The Case for Make Believe: Saving Play in a Commercialized World. A psychologist who once worked for Fred Rogers and is a psychiatry professor at Harvard Medical School, Linn laments the fact that it's hard to find any products for kids--from food to toys-- that aren't adorned by brand logos. "An engaging, unbranded puppet will encourage self-expression," Linn says, "while a Cookie Monster puppet is always Cookie Monster and does little more than eat cookies." But the issue is bigger than creativity. "What's at risk," Linn says, "is the development of essential life skills, the ability for children to look to themselves for generating amusement and to soothe themselves when they feel stressed."

Children would be less vulnerable to licensing were it not for the all-consuming role of screen media in their lives. Today's kids, from the ages of 8 to 18, spend 44.5 hours a week--the equivalent of a full-time job, with a few extra hours thrown in for overtime--using the media, according to a 2005 Kaiser study. Before they are 2 years old, 38 percent of kids can turn on the TV and 40 percent can change channels; by the time they are 4 years old, 69 percent of kids can put in a DVD and 71 percent can operate the remote control; by age 6, a third have TVs in their bedrooms and by adolescence that figure doubles.

"To me, consumerism is the more insidious problem," says Tim Kasser, Ph. D., an associate professor of psychology at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, and author of The High Price of Materialism. "It's less obviously seen. It's the water in which we swim." Studies show an association between materialism in children and impairment on a host of markers of physical, social, and psychological wellbeing. "Children who are high on scales of materialism report being less happy, less satisfied with life, more depressed, and more anxious. They have lower self-esteem," he says. "One report even shows more somatic problems such as headaches and stomachaches."

Recently, economist Juliet B. Schor, Ph. D., published groundbreaking research on consumerism, media use, and well-being among 300 fifth-and sixth-graders in the Boston area, one of the first studies of consumerism in children this age. The data connected the dots between television watching and increased consumerism in kids. Schor, author of Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture, found that both screen time and high consumer involvement were significant causes of depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, psychosomatic complaints, and increased conflicts with parents. The study specifically found that consumerism and screen time led to mental-health problems, rather than the other way around. It wasn't clear how this entire stew of misery came about--whether consumerism made kids envious of others, or cut into time for exercise, or dampened their fantasy lives--but the end result was undeniable: Too much media and consumer involvement in a child worsens nearly every measure of wellness and family harmony.

Clearly, today's children are under siege. So with the help of the researchers, physicians, and educators, we've created some rules for anti–child marketing jujitsu, guidelines parents can use to delay the moment when their child's imagination quits thinking about a pony and replaces it with My Little Pony (see "The Princess Diatribes," at right).

It's a constant battle. While visiting friends recently, a mother started in on my little girl because she didn't know about Hannah Montana. Buying groceries, we push our cart past Dora dolls next to the jelly, Barbies near the chips, and a TV airing a loop of the High School Musical kids singing and selling Sara Lee bread. A trip to Toys "R" Us is like peeling back my daughter's scalp, and ladling a hot porridge of branding into her skull.

I don't want Parker to grow up without any cultural references, so I've been picking my battles. We avoid the mac 'n' cheese boxes imprinted with Scooby Doo, but we have cans of SpaghettiOs featuring Disney princesses. I let her watch whatever she wants at Grandpa's house. He recently thought it would be funny to tell her to tell me she likes Hannah Montana, but she told him she didn't. Maybe we're gaining ground. Then again, maybe not.

Taking Kasser's advice, when Parker one day pressed us for a Dora hat and sunglasses, even though she has plenty of hats and sunglasses, we tried the straight talk.

"You're going to grow out of Dora," my wife said. "You know what Dora is?" I added. "She's marketing."

My daughter listened, thought about what we had said, and smiled. "Well, then, I want a Dora hat and sunglasses so I can grow out of them!"