Kids, do you beg your parents to just buy this, or buy that? I bet you do... Companies have come up with a genius idea about how to get families to buy their products target kids in their advertisements. But some ways parents can avoid those ads are by putting parental controls on their tv listings, or they can find another way to entertain their child. For example sometimes they can just go outside and enjoy the beautiful mother nature around them.

It makes sense, the parents of that child see an and aren’t tempted at all. But-when the child sees the ad they usually start wanting the product more and more as the commercial gets played often. Eventually after the kid sees the advertisement about 5 or 6 times within a 30 minute kids show, the kid is going to start begging their parents to buy them that new Marvel toy because they are then lured into wanting it. There is another case where for example McDonalds may target kids in their ad. That by itself is really bad too because they are making kids think that if you eat at McDonalds then you’ll be just as happy as the person in the ad.

Big companies are making a killing amount of money from all these kids buying toys and spending money on clothes just to impress their friends. On average every kid in America spends about $780 and that is just their allowance, only about 1% of those kids actually save their allowance. Teens from the age of 13-17 in total spend about 258.7 billion, just in the United States alone. Now, obesity rates have been rocketing in the United States, why? Well some say kids are becoming lazy, which is true but also advertisements are promoting very unhealthy foods/beverages to kids all over the US. Big fast food companies like Burger King and McDonalds are making their kids friendly meals include 2% fat milk and adding apple slices to the kids meals. But really do you think that will actually affect kids choices on whether they are going to eat the apple slices and drink the milk because to me that is obscure.

Some people may say that influencing kids to eat unhealthy food is better than showing them an ad about drug and alcohol use. That is true but to a certain limit because both sides have their cons. For example drugs cause really serious diseases and is just bad for the users whole body in general. Most drug and alcohol users become addicted and try to get help but usually the user then just gets a craving for it again and keeps on getting addicted. While obese children’s parents can just persuade them to stop eating bad or just take away any junk food in the house.

In the end I give all those big companies props because they have a genius marketing team who knows what people will fall for and what people want. They are pros at their jobs that is why they get paid, everyday they lure people into buying their companies products. But they should really stop trying to target kids because we are the future of the human generation and we want to live to at least 60 before having to start worrying about obesity problems. People need to come to their senses and wake up, or else there will be no future if everyone is dying of obesity.

References

1.http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/21/health/research/21obesity.html?_r=0
2.http://www.statisticbrain.com/teenage-consumer-spending-statistics/
3.http://www.heart.org/HEARTORG/GettingHealthy/HealthierKids/ChildhoodObesity/Overweight-in-Children_UCM_304054_Article.jsp
4.http://business.time.com/2012/08/27/monkey-see-monkey-do-just-1-of-kids-save-any-allowance-money/
5.http://www.statista.com/statistics/194424/amount-spent-on-toys-per-child-by-country-since-2009/
6.http://www.apa.org/topics/kids-media/food.aspx
7.http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/11/12/the-disturbing-ways-that-fast-food-chains-disproportionately-target-black-kids/