Kids and Advertising

I'm pretty cautious when it comes to letting my children watch television. Few of the available kids' programs promote the kind of values that my husband and I are trying to teach our girls, and even seemingly innocent shows have had a negative influence on them. (Our oldest daughter started saying, "That's not fair," all the time after watching an episode of Dragon Tales.)

Most of the time, this isn't an issue because we don't have cable, so when the children want to watch something, we put in a video or dvd. I have started letting them watch some Saturday morning shows on NBC, though. I have such fond memories of watching cartoons with my little sister, and they actually have some decent programming like Veggie Tales and 3-2-1 Penguins. It also gives them an incentive to get their violin practicing done before their shows start, which has been helpful.

The one thing I forgot to take into account, however, was the commercials. For weeks now, I've been hearing about the amazing Bedazzler and a Betty Crocker bake set. This morning, my six-year-old actually ran to get a piece of paper and a marker to write down the phone number to order the bake set! I reminded her that it would cost money, and she said that it cost 10-something (unsure if it was $10 or $.10). My kids have also bought into the idea that they can buy great things by saving their Dum-Dum wrappers. Every time my four-year-old finds a penny she tells me she can buy a Dum-Dum yo-yo now.

I understand the point of advertising, and I think it can provide a service to both consumers and retailers. Still, I've always thought ads directed at kids were kind of mean. Children have no concept of value or expense, and at least in the case of my girls, they have no income. They seem more surprised than dismayed when we tell them we're not going to buy these things. The commercials make the products look so great. Why would we not want them?!

I don't know exactly where I'm going with this. Hopefully, I'll be able to teach my daughters that the products they see on tv aren't always as great as they seem, and I want to teach them to save their money and spend it wisely. This could be a good opportunity to have those kinds of discussions, and if it becomes a real problem, we can always go back to not watching commercial television. I do wonder, though, what our consumer-hungry culture is doing to the children who absorb this kind of thing every day.

Going into debt has become very easy to do now, and there seems to be no social stigma attached to it anymore. We recently saw a report about a woman who went online to beg strangers to help her pay her credit card bills. She was not a tragic figure. She was young and healthy, but she really liked to shop and got in over her head. I wonder when her desire to spend money began. Are we raising the next generation to throw its money away? Maybe the schools should start teaching children how to handle phone calls from creditors.