September 13, 2004
Here is an important article from Saturday's
Washington Post.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13374-2004Sep11.html
Those Ads Are Enough to Make Your Kids Sick
By Juliet Schor
A bubbly young
researcher armed with a video camera sits on the bedroom floor with
a 5-year-old
girl, watching her play and asking her questions.
The mother is off in the kitchen. After a bit, the young woman follows
the little girl into the bathroom, where a row of empty shampoo and
bubble bath bottles has been lined up above the tub. The market researcher
has an "aha" moment -- the little girl has turned the containers
into toys. The health and beauty aids company she's on assignment for
could do that too, she realizes, and after she submits her report,
the company redesigns its package to make it look more toy-like.
Around the country, scenes like this are being repeated daily. Advertisers
and the companies they represent are doing record levels of research
to help market their products to children. They are relying on brain
science, the reports of child advisers, and extensive videotaping of
kids in stores, at playgrounds and in their homes. Researchers I interviewed
recounted their taping sessions in kids' bedrooms, playing with toys
or grooming. A ritual as private as bath time has become familiar territory
as marketers observe children taking baths and showers to come up with
strategies to sell new health and beauty products, or novel approaches
for marketing existing ones. They investigate children's closets. They
even go to sleepovers.
American parents
have been well warned about junk food, how it dominates advertising
aimed toward children and how poor eating habits have led
a staggering 15 percent of the nation's children into obesity. They
are told of the health risks and that a whopping one-third of children
born today are expected to eventually develop diabetes.
But it's not just junk food
that endangers the health of our children, it's also the "junk culture" that
surrounds them. And that junk culture is not only making children
materialistic, it is making
them sick. They are becoming depressed and anxious, my research shows.
They are suffering from headaches and stomachaches, too.
We know our children are living in an environment where they are bombarded
with advertising aimed just at them, but it is influencing them in
more ways than their parents might imagine.
The average American child is exposed to 40,000 advertising messages
each year, according to recent estimates, and corporations are currently
spending $15 billion annually advertising and marketing to kids up
to age 12. With all this money at hand, companies are ratcheting up
their kid-oriented ad budgets to promote entertainment, fashion and
apparel, electronics and furniture, and health and beauty aids. After
more than a decade of relentless advertising and marketing to children,
the results are striking.
By the time many children
reach early elementary school, they have already been incorporated
into the universe of junk entertainment,
listening to music and watching movies and television that offer them
unprecedented levels of violence along with the presentation of young
people as sexual objects. (MTV isn't just for teenagers, it's a kid
phenomenon, too.) By the time these kids enter the 8 to 12 "tween" stage,
they've adopted the junk values of materialism and the desire to be
rich. When I interviewed Martin Lindstrom, a branding expert, he cited
a recent survey by the Millward Brown global market research agency.
It reveals that nowhere else in the world are 8- to 12-year-olds more
materialistic (75 percent desire to be "rich,") or more likely
to believe that their clothes and brands describe who they are and
define their social status.
All this is not only distasteful, it is unhealthy, as I found after
surveying 300 children ages 10 to 13 in urban and suburban Boston in
2002 and 2003.
I came to this conclusion
by creating a new measure of the kids' level of "involvement" in
consumer culture -- in addition to their media exposure, which is
the usual standard. I asked questions about
how much they were psychically tuned in to the values and aspirations
of consuming, such as how much they cared about having a lot of stuff;
how important designer labels and a nice family car were to them; whether
they usually were focused on acquiring something new; and how much
they wanted to be rich and wanted their parents to be richer.
Among the suburban kids whose parents were more restrictive about
consumer culture, I also found that the more they bought into that
culture, the more negative they were about their parents, and the more
likely they were to fight and disagree with them.
While the figures tell me children's well-being was affected by consumer
involvement, they do not explain how. One possibility is that people
who are envious of others and worried about possessions and money are
more likely to be depressed and anxious. Desiring less -- rather than
getting more -- seems to be the key to contentment and well-being.
Perhaps, as they focus on the consumer culture, kids spend less time
in the reading and play that keeps them happy and healthy. Difficult
as it is to explain, the connection is clear: The more enmeshed children
are in the culture of getting and spending, the more they suffer for
it.
As I interviewed children and parents, I found the conversations were
supporting what the figures were telling me. Parents who were involved
in conflicts with their kids about buying stuff, eating junk food,
and watching TV, playing video games and using the Internet also reported
that their children were experiencing behavior problems, difficulties
in school and unhappiness.
How have things gotten so far out of hand? For the last decade, the
kids junk culture has been relentlessly pushed by a small number of
mega-corporations -- Viacom, Disney, McDonald's, Burger King, Philip
Morris, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Sony Pictures and others. Through their advertising
agencies, these companies have developed sophisticated and effective
methods of reaching children that go far beyond the television ads
of yesteryear.
That kind of intensive research
went into companies figuring out they could turn shampoo bottles
into licensed character toys , plastic first-aid
bandages into "tattoos," and ketchup into a gross green goop
that kids will demand. Marketers have also perfected stealth marketing
efforts, such as "peer-to-peer" campaigns that enlist kids
to market to their friends and schoolmates, a process that has been
gaining popularity recently.
Language provides a particularly
telling clue to the marketers' mentality. It's a war out there. Children
are referred to as "targets." Printed
materials are "collateral"; grass-roots campaigns are "guerrilla" or "viral." Sometimes
they talk about "converting [a kid] into a user," a phrase
from the drug culture. There's little doubt about who's winning this
war either, as marketers have transformed childhood from an idyllic
to a hazardous life stage. It's high time parents and legislators took
notice and countered the growing culture of junk.
Findings like mine, as well as those of many other studies that document
the harmful effects of the individual components of the junk culture
-- food, violent video games, oversexualized body images, and youth
consumption of drugs, tobacco and alcohol -- suggest that adults are
failing to protect children in basic ways.
Many adults respond to the junk culture with a fatalistic attitude,
shrugging it off as inescapable or not essentially different from what
they experienced as children. But others are breaking through that
denial to push legislative agendas that pursue new protections from
advertising, such as the Parents' Bill of Rights, a set of nine measures
to reform marketing practices being sought by Commercial
Alert, an
organization based in Portland, Ore. Other groups advocate school-based
measures such as district-wide prohibitions against soft-drink contracts
in schools.
Industry is fighting back, by dominating government panels, providing
stepped-up financial contributions to politicians and advocacy groups
such as the National PTA and funding industry front groups such as
the Center for Consumer Freedom. But with mounting evidence of the
harm being done to America's children by the junk culture, it's high
time parents, educators and children's advocates stood up to the junk
purveyors and reclaimed the culture of childhood.
Author's e-mail: schorj@bc.edu
Juliet Schor is a professor
of sociology at Boston College and the author of a new book, "Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and
the New Consumer Culture" (Scribner). She is on the advisory board
of Commercial Alert. |
