fight

WORDS KAREN JAYES

RELATIONSHIPS SPECIAL REPORT

ADVERTISERS ARE TARGETING OUR CHILDREN AT A YOUNGER AGE. HOW CAN WE PROTECT THEIR MENTAL ENVIRONMENT?

FOR THEIR

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hree-year-old Amani was in a panic: Mom, Mom! he yelled. Ren Smith dropped what she was doing and ran into the living room to her son, who was sitting staring at the television. Look Mom, look! His eyes were wide with fear and he clung to her, his little finger pointing at the screen. I couldnt work out what was bothering him in the ad, says Smith, a media consultant, but eventually I figured out: it was a vulture. He associated it with a scary character in a kids movie hed watched and, though the ad itself wasnt scary, hed transposed that fear onto it. He couldnt stop talking about it for days. For Smith, who is writing her PhD on media consumption and how it affects our lifestyles, this, and many other instances when she has watched television through her sons eyes, shows her how consuming the medium is for children, and how no ad they see on television, or absorb through other media the Internet, billboards

and radio is ever dealt with in isolation, nor is ever entirely forgotten. Its not a new observation. Coming up with guiding principles that respect the rights of children above the rights of broadcasters and advertisers to clinch profits formed the skeleton of the World Summit on Children and the Media in Johannesburg in March this year. Media is not the secondary curriculum for our children, its the primary curriculum, says Jeanne Prinsloo, associate professor of Journalism and Media Studies at Rhodes. And unless we take this very seriously, were doing the future of this country a huge disservice.

Very little is done in schools around educating children to be critical media consumers, especially when it comes to understanding concepts of advertising and branding, she says. Were living in an extremely capitalistic society, and children need to be taught where these messages are coming from and what the motives of the messengers really are. But first, parents need to wise up, she says. We are all aware of how quickly children incorporate television into their lives, but the power of advertising goes further and parents themselves arent even aware of it. In Packaging Girlhood (St Martins Press; available from Kalahari.net), authors Sharon Lamb and Lyn Mikel Brown illustrate how the extension of TV characters into all sorts of toys, computer games, food and bedroom dcor, means that brands form the basis not only of young childrens play, but also of bathing, eating, crche and even bedtime. For older kids, product placement in television programmes, aggressive marketing tactics employed in shopping malls (cue hip music and hot sales assistants), and sponsorship of schools and
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