The Effects Of Too Much Marketing Towards Children

Corporate marketers intentionally make parents miserable, by convincing kids that life is about buying (Barbaro, A ,2008). Children are a purchasing influences, as in they can decide what type of car a family should buy, where to go on vacation etc... Corporate marketers have caught on to this and make a parent’s life difficult by sending out messages of a product that the child â€Å"must have†, this then leads the child into nagging the parent until they give in and buy it for them. Children have a lot of power and advertisers know it. On average a child spends 40 hours a week outside of school consuming media, which is mostly commercial driven (Susan, L, 2003) and in addition, approximately 3000 commercial messages sent to a child a day†¦show more content†¦Health issues To begin with, marketing to children can cause health problems such as diabetes and obesity. The media is the cause for obesity and diabetes because it promotes junk food over healthy food and directs it at younger children when they are too young to understand the consequences of eating healthy or just do not understand. This leads to child hood obesity, which 16% of children and teenagers are overweight, which is four times the amount it was in the 1960’s (Barbaro, A, 2008). In addition, the health issues you see in adults, are now being seen in 7 year olds for example, type 2 diabetes (Barbaro, A, 2008). Furthermore, the media also causes mental health problems such as ADHD, depression and anxiety. When a child starts off watching television and playing video games it can lead to the child having ADHD because of the way kid’s television shows are now made, it makes it hard for the child to focus outside of the consuming media (Barbaro, A, 2008). In addition, the more media a child is exposed to the higher on the scale of depression and anxiety they are. Children and teenagers look to media to self-identify themselves and when the media projects an image of how and what they should do and look like, it unfortunately sparks depression and anxiety. As a matter of fact, there has been a rise of 8 million prescriptions for antidepressants in the U.S (Barbaro, A, 2008). Ultimately, there is concern that these technologies exert too much control over our