How to Protect Children from Advertising?
By: Tyler Benson

Advertising is everywhere, you can’t escape it. It turns people into its obedient crowd. The same information entering our heads makes everyone think and act in the same way. It tries to influence our way of thinking, determine our habits and opinions. Films and books also can do it, but there is always an author behind them – a human being with his/ her life position which he/ she wants to share with us. Advertising has nothing to share. There is no person behind it; it is usually some company with the only desire to increase sales rates. We interest it only from this point of view. Being aware of it, we can be more critical to it and oppose its influence.

And what about our children? Can they resist its strong and obtrusive influence? They are a dream of advertisers. They are so naïve, complaisant, unpretentious clients. The research made by sociologists showed that children under eight: Don’t discern TV advertising and very often consider it to be one of the TV Programmes. Besides they can’t realize its imposing purpose. They trust TV advertisements. They want to have the advertised goods and push their parents to buy it. The average child watches 350 000 TV adverts at this age (William McGuire). American researchers faced this problem in 80s; they formed special laboratories for investigating the influence of advertising on children. The scientists attempted to find out if the children can be taught to oppose low- quality advertising. They wanted to invent some kind of “injection” against advertising, the so – called vaccination. In one of such projects a group of scientists gave three classes on Advertising analysis to primary schoolchildren. Each class lasted for about half an hour. The point of vaccination was to view the advert and then discuss it. After watching the advert of toys, children were immediately given these toys and they were asked to do the same they had seen on TV. Such experience helps to form a more realistic attitude to advertising. A group of psychologists headed by Alfred McAlister tried to “vaccinate” the teenagers against yielding to cigarette adverts. The pupils of 9th form watched the TV advert in which an emancipated woman was smoking a cigarette.

The children were taught to react the advert with the phrases like “How can she be free, if she depends on tobacco”. They also participated in the games where a child who was called a dweeb for refusing the cigarette had to reply with a phrase like “I would be a dweeb if I smoked only to impress you”. Then each pupil wrote a process essay describing how the advertising affects them. Essay writing showed that the children were attracted by the eye-catching images in the adverts and did not think about the real value of the advertised products. After these experiments the number of pupils inclined to start smoking was half as much in comparison with pupils from the other school. Vaccination consists in teaching children to be more critical to advertising, presented in attractive and imperative form. It also aims at finding alternatives to the adverted item, forming a protective reaction against direct influence of the advertising.

Article Source: http://www.ArticleJoe.com

Tyler Benson is a senior writer of BestEssays.com - Custom Essay writing service. Currently he is working on creating his writing guide for university students. It will cover all the details of the essay writing process and explaining the peculiarities of writing every type of essay (e.g. process essay).

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