Gauging the Impact: Multimedia and Children
By Adam Maya
“Parents are fighting a $15 billion industry,” proclaimed Christy Glaubke, of the watch group “Children Now.”
If you’ve ever walked down the cereal aisle with a child, you know what Glaubke is talking about: advertising. On average, there’s a food commercial every five minutes during Saturday morning children shows. And 72 percent of all ads during children’s programming involves candy, sugar-heavy cereal and fast food.
As a result, millions of American children are obese and have poor nutrition, just two of the costs of advertising, Glaubke asserted. Other costs include positive attitudes toward tobacco, alcohol and violence, not to mention the nag factor.
Just how vulnerable are children to the persuasive intent of ads? From the age of two, children can be influenced by what they see on TV, Glaubke said. Some restrictions do protect them. For example, a network cannot show a character advertising a product while that character’s show is being broadcast; children below a certain age cannot distinguish the difference. In other words, when the Flintstones are on, don’t expect Fred to endorse any vitamins or cereal.
Children Now’s “children and the media” program has set out to change regulations in children’s multimedia entertainment. She cited studies saying that children 8-18 spend 6.5 hours a day on average with media (watching TV, playing video games, on the Internet, etc.). Furthermore, two-thirds of all children have a TV in their bedroom; half have a video game console. Glaubke is especially concerned with simultaneous TV and Internet use, citing that children visit a site related to what they’re watching 28 percent of the time.
Last September the FCC limited repeats of children’s shows on network television to 50 percent, meaning for every two episodes of SpongeBob Squarepants, only one can be replayed later. But, then there is the SpongeBob Squarepants Web site, which features a video game that requires kids to refer to their Spongebob cereal box to continue. In the same ruling, the FCC ordered that all network shows geared toward children must include an “E/I” symbol during the broadcast designating that it is either educational or informational.
Glaubke has also researched how women are portrayed in the media, how children’s perception of race and class are constructed by the media, masculinity, local TV coverage of children and violence, gender and race in video games. Latinos are the most underrepresented group in prime time TV, Glaubke said, accounting for just two percent.
But there has been progress. Take the show “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” one of the first to feature a female heroine on prime time TV. Another example is Dora the Explorer, originally conceived as a bunny rabbit; now she is a Latina.
To contain the influence the worlds of media and entertainment have on your children, Glaubke recommends the following:
• Know your child.
• Read the ratings.
• Go online.
• Take new shows or video games for a “test drive,”
• Talk with other parents,
• Talk to your children about what they see
• Set limits on the content and the amount of exposure they have
• Let your voice be heard (by law the FCC must respond to all complaints they receive about a program).
“You have to know who your kid is and what they’re capable of handling,” Glaubke says.
And don’t forget, watch out for that cereal aisle.
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