The Negative Influence Of Advertising On Young Children

Superior Essays
In our generations, parents are always seeking to understand why their children tend to spend all their money while shopping. The mass media, children and younger generations are easy to influence within the market field and are used as puppets. Children are less able to analyze facts that are directed to them which applies an immoral way to target children using such advertisements. This paper will explain the influence caused by media and marketing that impact on the lives of young children by overwhelming them with advertisements. Children are being used a material which helps the marketers business rise. The advertisements allows children to seek the intentions of how to think rather than what to think and be yourself. Marketing to children has become a huge social problem since the 1980’s (Schor, 2008). As marketing to children created a major issue, no action has been made to eliminate this tragedy. …show more content…
The documentary “Consuming Kids: The Commercialization of Childhood” emphasis on the negative aspects marketers are implying onto to children due to the exposure of negative subjects such as sex, violence, junk food, drugs, alcohol and false intentions (Barbaro, 2008). The commercials advertised to the children are very influential which means children watching it are entertained and are used as puppets to follow what they see. Since marketers main target is children, young consumers are being manipulated at such a young age to convince their parents to purchase all the new products. Marketers main goal is to gain customers which is why they intend to reach out to the younger generations but parents are unware of the social problem caused by this. In the first part of the paper, I will focus on the negative influential effect marketers are presenting to children also; this will be followed by the other effects such as social actions resulting the advertisements and also health issues. The documentary “Consuming Kids: The Commercialization of Childhood” results as a way to prove the negative impacts being produced by advertising to children. This is due to parents being unaware of the cause the marketers have influenced in their child’s lives and these advertisements create a negative mindset but are unconscious. Since marketer’s job is to gain customers they study children and mainly address these children without any parental objectives. Children can get stubborn if they are convinced by marketers of a “new” product since it’s a popular object, children gets their parent’s attention by being stubborn and “nagging” them for the merchandise. Children are able to be controlled through marketers due to their power of influencing their parents to buy the products (Barbaro, 2008). This is known to be true due to the fact that children always aggravate their parents to purchase the new products that are being advertised which is not only for their sake it’s because “everyone has it.” About 47% of parental household spending is now influenced by children, either directly or indirectly (Schor, 2008). Due to some parents allowing their children to engage in such products are not understanding the inappropriate factors that are displayed within the advertisements. Marketer’s technique is to manipulate consumers at such a young age to purchase their products, so as they grow up they are influenced by such marketers and can have them as their lifelong customers. These products being sold to children at such young age are exposed to negative aspects of society which needs to be changed. The consequences that the power of this unrestrained consumer culture is undermining the visible, physical, and emotional health of a child’s well-being (Schor, 2008). As a child, being manipulated at a young age can lead to a lack of understanding the reality of the outside world and the ability to think for themselves so to overcome that marketers need to understand they should not be selfish of their job. The issue between young children and marketing is that way the marketers approach their advertisements in such a negative conceptual of identity. Children are overwhelmed by the advertisement’s the marketers are producing and it is not right

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