Students in Seminole County, Florida, brought home their first report cards of term last November. There were, undoubtedly, some surprises inside these cards for hopeful parents, but the biggest surprise was on the outside: Ronald McDonald and the Golden Arches. 

The school board of Seminole County had reached an agreement with local McDonald's franchises to print these advertising icons on the envelopes containing the report cards of all children, from Kindergarten to the start of secondary school, in the district. Children with good grades, behaviour or attendance could take their report cards to their local McDonald's and receive a free Happy Meal in return.

Because the shows children watch, the toys they play with, the clothes they wear, and the packaging of the food they eat is already emblazoned with so many advertisements, marketers have had to become increasingly ingenious about placing product messages in new corners of children's lives. Thus, in addition to the outside of report cards, it has become increasingly commonplace in America to find marketing messages in schools, including in textbooks and curricula designed by corporations. One company, Channel One, even gives free televisions to schools in return for guarantees that the students will watch their news program, which is, of course, interspersed with several minutes of advertising. Marketers also go after children on the Internet, with pop-up ads, immersive virtual play areas loaded with commercial tie-ins, and stealth advertising, whereby hired actors enter chat rooms to talk up products.

Even children's sleepovers are no longer immune from marketing. A firm called Girls Intelligence Agency recruits girls to invite their friends to sleepover parties at which the hostess presents products to her friends and then reports back to the agency about which products were preferred. The "agent" is told not to let her friends in on the fact that marketing research was the purpose of the sleepover.

Some may see these practices as little more than the natural right of corporations to seek a profit. From this perspective, children are an important focus for marketing, given that they purchase or influence their parents' purchase of around $500 billion worth of products and services every year. If children can be convinced to purchase certain brands when they are young, a company might gain lifetime customers. No surprise, then, that around $12 billion was spent on advertising to U.S. children in 2000. 

Recent scientific research, however, gives us good cause to be uneasy about the extent of advertising directed at children and how much they are being socialized to care about possessions and "stuff". Books such as Juliet Schor's Born to Buy and Susan Linn's Consuming Kids have reviewed a great deal of research showing that when children are exposed to consumer culture, they are placed at increased risk of a variety of physical and psychological problems. Specifically, peer-reviewed, scientific studies show that marketing to children and exposure to consumer culture are significantly associated with increased chances of becoming obese, developing eating disorders like anorexia or bulimia, acting in violent and aggressive ways, using alcohol and cigarettes, and being sexually promiscuous. Other research my colleagues and I have conducted shows, similarly, that when children and adolescents take on the materialistic values encouraged by our consumer culture, they feel less happy, have lower self-esteem, act in a less generous and more selfish manner, and are more likely to behave in ecologically-damaging ways.  

Although parents must shoulder some of the responsibility for these problems, parents cannot protect their children from consumerism at every moment of their lives, especially given how omnipresent marketing has become in society. Parents need help to fight back against the damaging effects of consumer culture on their children. 

Given that there are no empirically documented benefits of marketing to children (other than increased profits for companies) and given the large amount of research showing that marketing does harm children, some child advocates have proposed that it is time to ban marketing to children. Indeed, some countries have passed laws placing outright bans on marketing to children, whilst others have limited the times of day when marketing to children can occur, or have restricted the way in which products can be advertised. Most countries do not, however, have such laws.

Just as past generations of adults have recognized that children need to be protected from working in factories, from being sold cigarettes and alcohol, and from viewing or participating in pornography, I would suggest that it is now time for our generation of parents, teachers and advocates to work to protect children in this arena.

Children deserve, indeed need, protection from marketers and corporations who are primarily interested in profiting from them, not in promoting their healthy development and well-being.

Tim Kasser is Associate Professor of Psychology, Knox College, Galesburg, Illinois, USA

Note: The pressure group Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood was recently successful in ousting McDonald’s from the Seminole County school report cards. Click here for further details.

For further reading on the effects of commercialising childhood see:

American Psychological Association Task Force on Advertising and Children (2004)

Psychological Issues in the Increasing Commercialization of Childhood. Washington DC:  American Psychological Association

Kasser, T. (2002).  The high price of materialism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

Linn, S. (2004).  Consuming kids: The hostile takeover of childhood. New York: New Press

Schor, J. (2004). Born to buy:  The commercialized kid and the new consumer culture. New York: Scribner.