Children see, children do

Advertising sends messages that have to be carefully interpreted and discerned by the receiver, but as children sometimes don’t know how to discern the message, this way of communicating can become very dangerous for them. Children are very vulnerable to change and shaping their habits according to what they see, and now a days, they are mostly seeing advertisings that can shape them in a negative way. Actually, children are exposed to a lot of dangerous media. Advertising of new toys is making them consumers since they are little, and getting them used to manipulation. Worst of all, children are learning to be discriminative and stereotyping from advertising. Commercials make them believe that they have to get the latest toy of the moment to be able to fit in, and that if someone does not have the new toy or fashion, then they don’t fit in.

Using his own experience as a father of a two year old child, journalist Constantine Von Hoffman explains and criticizes the influence that advertising has in children since they first open their eyes to the world. Decorating a baby´s room with commercial exposed themes like Disney or Warner Bros. is, according to Hoffman, probably the first unrealized media exposure that children experience. He also marks television as the downfall of parents and the main source of commercial exposure to children. The fact that sometimes working parents need a break from constant co-babysitting or just half hour to cook or clean makes it inevitable for them to let children watch some television.

Advertisers can´t deny that they are becoming every day more interested in children advertising. They are making researches about the impact of ads on children because they are seeing them as potential customers and an effective way of increasing advertising power. There are some researches that point that advertising among young people is negatively influenced by their specific age, for example, the older the child, the lower the ad effectiveness. This exemplifies the interest of companies to target younger children, to have a more effective advertising influence. Even though they are aware of the fact that children do change their behavior with specific advertising, they are willing to do what it takes to get their attention and make them buy specific products.