Commercialism: Keeping Kids Safe and Savvy

Battling the Brands

By Jill Oestreicher Gross

“I’m going to make the bathtub shine with Clorox,” my almost 5-year-old daughter said during a recent nighttime bath, as she scrubbed it clean with her purple soap and washcloth.

I did a double take. “Where did you hear about Clorox?” I asked her.

“From a commercial,” she said proudly – and much to my dismay.

I’ll admit it: I let my children watch television. But in the course of writing this article, I’ve learned how to tackle some of the issues that commercials, television shows and other media create for children – and their parents – particularly during school and holiday shopping seasons.

Kids are highly impressionable, lucrative consumers, influencing close to $500 billion in purchases every year, according to James McNeal, professor emeritus at Texas A&M University.

“Cradle to grave” marketing – capturing a consumer from infancy through adulthood – reaches children of all ages through the images, characters and products they see on TV, in books, on toys, on the Internet, at the movies, on their cell phones, in stores and among friends. In her book Born to Buy, consumer researcher Juliet Schor reports that the average kindergartener can identify 300 logos and the average 10-year-old knows almost 400 brands.

“Commercialism has never permeated society like this before,” says psychologist Susan Linn, associate director of the Media Center at the Judge Baker Children’s Center in Boston. Linn is also co-founder and director of the center’s Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, which works to limit the impact of commercial culture on children. “It’s unfair that children are bombarded with this kind of marketing,” says Linn, the author of Consuming Kids and The The Case for Make-Believe: Saving Play in a Commercial World. “It’s challenging to be a parent and this is one more challenge.”