We know that the media has a tremendous influence on our children. Advertisers know this too.
As a parent of two children, I sometimes find myself longing for the days when the Brady Bunch and Gilligan’s Island were the after-school programs of choice. (They don’t make TV like that any more.)
These days you can’t watch a weekend afternoon sporting event without seeing a commercial for Viagra or Victoria’s Secret and having to explain why the two people are sitting in bathtubs holding hands—some commercials children just don’t need to see.
And nowadays, the media is so much more than TV. It includes the Internet, FaceBook, iPods, cell phone messages… you name it. There are multiple platforms and opportunities for the media to reach and influence our children’s lives.
Media Literacy and Social Marketing
Media literacy is about helping people become critical thinkers and ask questions about the messages they see, hear, and otherwise consume from the media. Our marketing firm often develops media literacy campaigns as part of our social marketing work. For example, we did a campaign for the Department of Health that was called “Question the Message.” The point of the campaign was to help kids and teens learn how the media attempts to manipulate them, and to question drug and alcohol advertising. It’s amazing how children and teens have an innate trust of information and messaging distributed through mass media, but more about that in a later blog post.
Recently, I came across two articles in our daily newspaper that discussed the influence of the media on our young people—the perfect launching pad for this blog post.
Marketing at Our Young People
An article entitled “Too sexy too soon” touched on the marketing efforts directed at our pre-teen girls that touts products such as “push-up bikini tops… thongs for 10-year-olds… and makeup for 8- to 12-year-olds…” The article says that messages like these are making our youngsters grow up too soon. The media certainly isn’t making our lives any easier as parents. But what’s a parent to do?
The second article provides some guidance for parents. In this article, author and chairwoman of the counseling and psychology departments at the University of Massachusetts (Boston) Sharon Lamb suggests that the best thing we can do is to check in with our children and make sure we know exactly what they are consuming through the media and share these experiences with them. What shows are they watching? What music are they listening to? What commercials and ads are they seeing? What do these messages make them think or feel?
In short, she’s suggesting that we become involved parents and work as media literacy coaches if you will. Yes, that’s right, she is telling us that we must do our jobs. If our children are watching or listening to something that’s not appropriate, it’s up to us to set the boundaries and say “no.” This is not so different from a theme of an earlier post on Internet safety.
We, as parents, have a choice. We can choose to let our children learn about topics such as dating, sex, drugs, and alcohol from what they are consuming through the media. Or we can try to be the go-to source from which they seek out this information. Which would you prefer?
Media Influence: Taking the good with the bad
I try to stay aware of the programs my children are watching, but it isn’t always easy. I’m not always successful in preventing certain songs from finding their way onto my daughter’s iPod (but I’ve banned a few after the fact). I’ve seen my youngest child struggle with telling the difference between commercials, TV shows and reality. She reports to me about all the wonderful things we could buy by calling a 1-800 number she memorized (I’m not sure how many times she has seen the commercial for Roll ‘n Grow, but she can’t wait to buy that for her own house!).
At the same time, she asks if Hannah Montana really lives in that house in California and if Jackson really is her brother. (When a real recording star has her own TV show, it can be confusing to distinguish between real life and TV life.) Thanks to the Disney Channel, many of our young girls (my daughter included) are convinced that anyone can be a pop star and have a TV show of their own—after all, everybody’s doing it (think Demi Lovato, Selena Gomez, Hannah Montana/Mylie Cyrus)!
While much of this post focuses on what I see as the “down side” of the media’s influence, I also recognize that there is some “good” that comes from it and I saw an example of this recently while on a family trip to Washington DC. My youngest daughter who has seen the movie “Night at the Museum” was talking about some of the characters from the movie. She knew the movie took place in the Smithsonian Museum and she was on a mission to find the characters. That was fine with me—anything to keep her engaged and interested in getting to these museums, right?
When I learned that Amelia Earhart was also in that movie, I thought a trip to the Air and Space Museum would be in order. Thanks to the movie, it was easy to convince her to join me. So my youngest and I trekked over to that museum in our search for Amelia Earhart. While we didn’t find her actual plane (she likely crashed somewhere over the Pacific Ocean, I explained), my daughter decided to buy her biography from the museum’s gift store. As we walked down the mall to meet up with my husband and other daughter, she buried her nose in that book and only looked up from time to time to make sure she wasn’t running into anything. She was reading and happily engaged in learning because of a movie.
As a parent of a child who hasn’t been a huge fan of reading, that sight was indeed “priceless” just like those credit card commercials say and it put a big smile on my face. So while the media can influence our children in some not-so-nice ways and force us to work harder as parents, there is a silver lining that can make all those battles about song lyrics, dress codes, television shows, and radio stations worthwhile.
Additional Reading:
Jean Kilbourne‘s research-based work on advertising effects, especially Deadly Persuasion: Why Women and Girls Must Fight the Addictive Power of Advertising and So Sexy So Soon: The New Sexualized Childhood and What Parents Can Do to Protect Their Kids.
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photo credit: Image by Rachel E. Chapman via Flickr. cc by 2.0
