The Effect of Advertising on Children

By Ahmed Abdel Aal

Advertisements Aim and Purpose

The main purpose of any advertisement is to persuade the audience about the quality of the product and instill or induce in the audience to keep on purchasing.

Do you know?
25% of preschoolers, more than 33% of grade schoolers, and more than 50% of high schoolers have T.V. sets in their bedrooms The average American child views 20,000 T.V. ads per year Brand loyalty can begin to established as early as age 2 4 hours of T.V. programming contain about 100 ads

More to know
By 2001, children ages 4-12 spent an estimated $35 billion a year In 1998, teens spent a record $141 billion In 1997, children ages 12 and under influenced the spending of $500 billion

The purpose
The purpose of this research is to shed some light on the effect of media specially advertising on children and their behavior.

What to Discuss?
To what extent the effect of watching much advertising on children is examined and focused on.

Arguments
There are many arguments about why advertisements are good for our society. The arguments include: the economy, the knowledge we receive about products, and general entertainment. Another thing is that ads do not create these want: for our lives to be better, easier, safer, cleaner, and more fun. Advertisements just bring these deep down human wishes to the surface

Counter-Arguments
Many young people have low-self esteem and lead unhealthy lifestyles because they feel they should be thinner and more attractive like the models they see in adverts. This leads to serious problems like eatingdisorders and self-harm.

Counter-Arguments
People became too interested in material things. People are becoming more selfish and obsessed with their possessions and losing their values of patience, hard work, moderation and the importance of nonmaterial things like family and friends. This harms their relationships and their personal development, which has serious effects for society.

Positive Effects
Advertising to children generates jobs, injects money into the economy, and instills the importance of the freedom of choice in children at a young age. It also develops a childs ability to understand the value of money and teaches them that individuals can achieve anything if they are willing to pay the price.

Negative Effects
Advertising can also have negative effects over young minds if parents are not really careful and do not teach their children about the importance of money. In many cases, children tend to misinterpret the messages conveyed through the advertisement.

Negative Effects
Children end up having wrong believes about many issues. Advertising influences the minds of children, which creates a need to own that particular product being advertised. Glossy images on the magazines or billboards or flashy advertisements on television only create the impulse for impulsive buying.

Negative Effects
Parents who cannot deal with the rising demands or bad temper are only tending to give in to the demands of their children.

Parents' role
They need to monitor what influences the minds of children. Parents also need to be firm with children whenever their demands increase. Children need to be told gently that a no can not be turned into a yes with tears or brawls. Parents also need to instill good habits and help children to differentiate between right and wrong. And the sooner its told, the better it would be for the child and subsequently parents as well.

 Advertisers on the other hand, can also try to put their message across creatively and target the entire family rather than just children.
With a balanced approach, the negative effects of advertising can surely be controlled to a great scope.

Advertisers Role

 There is a real and noticeable corelationship between time spent with television and its impact on the behavior of a child and its influence on family spending.
This relation was researched and proven by many researchers. For better understanding of the relation and problem the further deeper and wide research has to be done to put and find remedial measures to lessen that impact on kids.

Conclusion

Thank You For Patience and Listening