Marketing and advertising: harmful to children's health.

Marketing and advertising: harmful to children’s health One of the biggest contributors to the explosive increase in childhood obesity, including such complications as type 2 diabetes, is aggressive marketing and advertising by the food industry, according to a group called Stop Commercial Exploitation of Children Coalition (SCEC). The group held its second annual Summit on the Commercialisation of Childhood in New York City on Sept 20. Susan Linn (Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA) said that in the early 20th century, children did hard physical work in factories, with the result that companies essentially owned their bodies. Now marketers are attempting to own children’s minds. Although marketing to children has been seen as acceptable only in the past decade or so, corporations have seized the advantage quickly: in 1999 they spent approximately US$12 billion on such efforts. Part of the philosophy now, according to Bob Ahuja, a professor of marketing at Xavier University (Cincinnati, OH), is not to appeal directly to parents, but to teach kids to influence their parents’ purchases. Children inundated with commercialism and surrounded by rampant materialism suffer not only from obesity but also from bodyimage and other emotional problems, eating disorders, and tendencies toward violence. “The sick child as viewer/consumer has replaced the healthy child of play, sports, and make-believe”, said Michael Brody (University of Maryland and chair of the TV/Media Committee of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry). Brody noted that while storytelling is the very essence of play, with toys as its catalyst, today’s toys, with their commercial links, actually act as “story blockers”.