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What a Kid Wants, What a Kid Needs
Making More Time for Family
By Kelly Burgess
"At that stage of development children are truly unable to distinguish between marketing concepts and reality," says Taylor. "That won't completely protect them from our commercial society, but it can definitely make an easier and more critical transition to commercial television."
Shawna Franklin* of Erie, Pa., saw firsthand how commercial television affected her 4-year-old son. "With an older child in the house, I became very lax about our television viewing habits," she says. "I was given a rude awakening when my youngest stopped signing nursery rhymes and started singing commercial jingles!"
The next step is to become a savvy media consumer. While a growing theme of ads is alienation from parents or superiority over adults, the prevailing theme is acceptance. In other words, if you have that product, you'll be "cool," and people will like you. Taylor says it's important to sit down with your child and take a critical look at ads to examine what they're selling and how they're selling it.
In fact, Taylor recommends doing this fairly intensively for a few weeks or even a month, at least once a day. You can even turn it into a game to have children spot some of the advertisers' gimmicks that are trying to get a kid to want something. Then, discuss the difference between needing and wanting and the reality of popularity as a result of having the right "stuff."
"If you do this for a couple of weeks fairly intensely, it's very empowering to a child," says Taylor. "It gives the kids a little distance from the ads and helps them understand the difference between wanting and needing."