Restricting Children’s Advertisements

Restricting Children’s Advertisements Over the past years, marketing to children has become a norm for companies to reap vast profits.

The practice arises as many companies realize that spending on advertisements to children and adolescents can lead to instant and future growth. Companies that adapt to this practice are the fast-food companies that promote junk food by making it look attractive, and the toy companies that look for fast vast sales. These companies spend extravagantly on this audience due to their known brand loyalty, and they dictate what their families should purchase. As a fact, most kids in the United States get exposed to the internet from a tender age that often leads to television addiction in most children. Similarly, Ariana Nefat and Dragan Benazic (2011) add that as kids make frequent stops at shops, they get exposed to the advertisement. Therefore, due to the adverse implications, advertising aimed at children must be restricted.

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According to Matthew A. Lapierre, Frances Fleming-Milici, Esther Rozendaal, Anna R. McAlister, and Jesssica Castonguay (2017), children and adolescents are exposed to an estimate of 30000 television advertisements every year. Despite the large figures, adverts aired on marketing content online, at the movies, or school are not inclusive. From our perspective, advertisements are relevant for children's socialization as consumers, grasp content about products, as well as develop specific identities as they evolve to adulthood. However, Jonathan Kent (2013) argues that this practice has less consideration, and advertisers utilize the opportunity to take advantage of young children. As a matter of fact, due to underdeveloped cognition, it is challenging for children to differentiate a commercial program from the program they watch.

It is clear that these advertising industries manipulate kids before proper cognition of their selves, or have financial management schemes that are unavailable at such tender age. That mentioned, these advertisement industries engage in unethical advertising practices, aiming at encouraging teenagers to be materialistic. In the current world, children have an obsession with fame; thus, leading to their nagging effect when they need a commodity they envisaged in an advertisement. This nagging character has raised concern among parents who claim that the adverts should be aimed at them and not their kids; because it's their cash spent for the kids possess nothing to enable them post-purchase orders.

Reasons for Restricting Advertisements Aimed at Children Most fast-food companies that engage in an online advertisement for their products do encourage the consumption of harmful diets (Nefat and Benazic, 2011). These companies target the children by motivating the purchase of high fat-content food, high sugar-level food, as well as food containing a vast quantity of oil. On the contrary, these fast-food companies do not advertise healthy food such as fruits and vegetables. Whereas the parents have to foresee a healthy life for their kids, it is evident that the advertisers in the fast-food markets aim to promote junk food consumption among kids. According to Melissa Dittmann (2004), these adverts have an impact on kids' character as well. For instance, when kids get exposed to junk food advertisements, they tend to grow up living a poor-diet lifestyle. The fact is that kids tend to believe that whatever adults guide them to do is always right, causing them to uprightly follow the advertisement without proper knowledge of the long-run implications.

The promotion of unhealthy food intake in children leads to early childhood obesity. Other than junk food as a cause of obesity in children, sitting long hours in front of the television also causes obesity in children. Currently, in the United States, most families have televisions installed in their children's rooms making parents unable to control the duration their kids sit in front of the television. From such, kids as young as 8-years get engaged in online activities for not less than 5-hours each day, with a minimum of one hour in every session. Whereas cigarette smoking is harmful, statistics expounds that the effects of obesity are worse and a cause of death in the United States.

Again, advertisements by the food industries and the toy companies do cause materialism in children. From assessments, it is clear that the number of television ads kids always watch is directly proportional to the orders they put forth. The materialistic value nature of children is

evident in situations where their parents refuse to approve of their orders. These materially obsessed kids often become furious with their parents who fail to purchase their desired products as aired in the advertisements. Fearfully, the urge created by advertising companies that lead to frequent child-related orders may lead to deterioration of parent-child communication. For that reason, parents would do anything possible to protect themselves from extravagant kids who do not comprehend whether their orders are assets or liabilities.

Advertisements are also a lead to racial discrimination amongst children from different ethnic groups. "If children are repeatedly exposed to certain portrayals of an ethnic group, they may develop a corresponding belief about the group," Ramsey (2006). For example, over the past decades, there was low representation and involvement of the black ethnic group in commercial programs aimed at children as compared to the white ethnic groups. For that matter, the underrepresentation of black kids in adverts may cause a belief that black kids are not competent to appear in commercial ads.

Again, the adverts aimed at children lead to them nagging their parents to purchase a specified product seen in the ads. The kids often cause pressure to their parents by continuous pestering to make the purchase. Despite the financial position and material criticism, parents have no option but to give in to the pressure. While parents may have a negative perception of the advertised products and go to an extent to question their authenticity, the advertising companies take to their advantage the naïve state of children to extort money from their parents who have the purchasing power.

Summary Due to the adverse implications, advertising aimed at children must be restricted. Adverts drive children to develop adverse perceptions about products, consumption, and a bad buying behavior. Several parents are unhappy about the impacts of the advertisement on their children. It is because the parents live with their children who make them spend unnecessarily on worthless products they see in adverts. Again, parents claim that their children are not familiar with the marketing effort and advertising activities by the companies, causing support from the parent to attempt to ban all advertisements aimed at kids.