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How to Save Your Kids from Junk Food Advertising

May 6th, 2010 Leave a comment Go to comments
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Admongo.GOV

Brand marketers and ad agencies know that children and teens are very impressionable. Food companies know that bonds created in these formative years, will promise a lifetime of loyalty to their brands. Hey,  I can still whistle the tunes of Saturday morning cereal commercials from the early eighties.

Although in the past few years several companies have agreed to limit their advertising to children under a certain age, for the most part, kids are still exposed to billions of dollars of commercials and ads for junk food, soda pop, and fast food establishments.

The government is powerless because advertising, as long as it is not misleading, is a form of free speech. And we should protect free speech.

But we also need to protect our children. When at age 8 I told my mom we need to buy Apple Jacks, having just watched the commercial, she asked me why. I immediately responded “they said on TV that it’s good for kids”. When instead we bought the unsweetened Cheerios, I was very mad and upset, but now I am thankful.

As parents today, it is much harder to protect our children. Junk food is so pervasive, and so are all the ads, merchandising tie ins from movies, and TV shows. In many cases the brands are embedded within the plot, or as part of a video game.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC)  has recently unveiled a website & game aimed at children in 4th to 6th grade that helps them learn about advertising to become more critical and judgmental. Will Admongo.gov be as popular as some of the junk foods it wants us to limit?

Probably not.

You can’t force your children to stop playing, watching TV, or seeing, hearing, and tasting what their friends are consuming. But you can invest the time to teach them critical thinking skills at an early age. Don’t wait till they are 10 years old. Even 3 and 4 year old children are intelligent and curious enough to learn what goes into foods and how they affect their bodies.

What to do at the supermarket:

If you take your children shopping with you, make sure you have plenty of time to make it an educational excursion. Set ground rules (each child can choose one snack and 3 different fruits). As you pass through the aisles, explain your rationale to the kids – health, price, convenience, taste. Get them to understand why you are choosing the things that you are. If they can read, teach them to look at labels and find products that have a short ingredient list and low salt and sugar values. You’ll be surprised how quickly they’ll learn.

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  • Bill

    You are wrong about regulating commercials as free speech, at least outside of cable. Erotica is regulated even though it is free speech. Vulgar language is regulated even though it is free speech. The argument is that the airwaves belong to the public, thus the FCC can regulate them (you pay for cable, so are inviting the speech into your home). Think Janet Jackson and the resulting fines. The government is not powerless to protect kids, it is unwilling.

  • uRDietitian

    Advertising is not a form of free speech. The very intention of advertising is to use any public medium of communication in order to induce people to buy or use your goods or services. Can you name five food products advertised on television that are not misleading or deceptive, which might actually be considered “healthy”? Do not include occasional or “in moderation” foods.
    The truth of the matter is that the more $$$$ you have, the more “free speech” you can afford to force on the consumer.
    In essence, we are paying for their “free speech”, yet our collective tax dollars funding the FDA and USDA are not supporting our rights as consumers to counter that free speech effectively.

  • http://www.growingraw.com GrowingRaw

    I’m all for tighter regulation on advertising so that kids don’t get brainwashed, but in the meantime there’s an easy alternative for parents as far as television advertising goes at least. Switch it off. Or at least limit the kids to the non-commercial channels. In Australia the best TV for kids is on ABC, which doesn’t have commercials.

    I also speak to my kids about persuasive language, and give them examples of how people use language to convince you that you need to buy something. With older kids you can start looking at media ‘reports’ and work on identifying objective vs subjective statements so that they can work out when an article is biased.