With just a few more days
for shopping and delivery of goodies for our or our kids Christmas stockings,
the ad season is in full swing. Any firm who has your e-mail address is
probably bombarding you with information of special offers. Of course, adults
like you or me are entirely resistant to such blandishments and only buy things
that are essential to our plan, don’t we? But what about our kids? Have we
built up their resistance?
By the time our kids are 5
years old we are supposed the have taught them to be Advertising Literate.
Haven’t done this yet? Well best make a start with Brett Berk’s Ad Literacy 101
today (1). New Year’s may be to late; your wallet may have become anorexic.
But note that like any
course, just taking 101 is not sufficient. Rozendaal et al in the current issue of Media Psychology explain that we need
to go much further to help our kids resist the compelling adverts that they are
exposed to (2). They point out that our children’s cognitive development isn’t
yet at a sufficient stage to act as a defense against the blandishment of the ad
agencies.
Two further trainings are
required. The first is Ad Literacy Performance mentoring so that our kids
actually know what to do with the Ad Literacy information. The second is termed
Attitudinal Ad Literacy which means that we have to instill a somewhat cynical
attitude so that our kids will, with the minimum of will power, raise their
defenses and become somewhat immune until cooler heads prevail – like when they
get to 21 and have their own paycheck.
This seems to set out the
curriculum for our preschoolers in these days of little or no supervision over
exposure levels.
- http://www.babble.com/kid/kid-school-learning/advertising-to-kids-media-effects-on-children/index.aspx
- E. Rozendaal et al, Media Psychology, 14, 333, (2011).
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