Tips to educate your child about advertising
The advertising ads they aim to mark patterns of consumption and behavior in the public. The problem arises when children are children, since advertising, a persuasive type of communication that seeks to change, reinforce or create attitudes towards a product or a service, will achieve this goal in a much simpler way when addressing the most little ones.
Thus, the moment of advertising ads, while for adults it is an unnecessary and unwanted interruption, the children's audience expects it with the greatest possible interest, to the point that many children await them with greater anxiety than their cartoon series favorites, especially in the era in which toys are the advertising protagonists as happens at Christmas. Faced with this situation, parents must:
- Teach them to apply the common sense.
- Stimulate your critical sense.
- Mark them limits.
Children, the target of the toy industry
The smallest ones are a relatively easy target for advertising stimuli, since they have much less critical capacity than adults, that is, they have less intellectual tools when facing advertising. So much so that, at early ages, they are not even able to distinguish between cartoons and commercial spaces, understanding the ads as just another entertainment.
That is why, in the case of toy advertisements, although they do not have direct purchasing capacity, advertising is aimed at them to take advantage of another not less important faculty: the ability to influence their parents, who are the ones who finally buy. That is to say, the advertising strategy focuses on: influencing children so that, in a second step, they influence their parents, uncles and grandparents who are the ones who will go to the store.
How to educate your child against advertising
1. Watch television together. Sharing a while to watch TV, as well as being a good way to spend time together, will be the most accurate way to educate your child about advertising. The solution is not therefore to censor the television content but to be by his side when he watches television and comment together those aspects that concern him or that he does not understand what he is seeing. In short, a perfect time to educate.
2. Know the playful interests of your child. Each child is different and each of them has different needs. Therefore, it is necessary that you know the playful interests of your child, that information will be fundamental to choose among all requests for toys that best suit your needs. Thus, you will be able to help your child choose the toy that best suits him and reorient his requests in the event that the chosen toy is not appropriate.
3. Teach him to choose. There are many toy ads, however, a child can not have them all. Although when watching a toy on television the first impulse will be to pronounce the famous phrase of I'm asking! the important thing resides just in the next minute. It will be time to remind him of the dangers of unbridled consumerism and teach him to accept that you can not have everything.
4. Help him write the letter to the Kings. Normally, the child asks for a series of toys and the parents then decide which ones they buy or those that remain in simple desire. However, instead of making that decision a posteriori using a critical sense that even the smallest do not have, the most appropriate thing is to make him reflect to choose the toys correctly. Therefore, writing the letter to the Magi together with parents and children will be the best way to achieve it.
6 years, the emergence of critical thinking in children
The ability of reasoning and logic appears after six years, age at which it is considered that minors begin to acquire critical thinking. Another key stage in development is adolescence, the moment in which the abstract is acquired. Therefore, the efforts of parents to educate their children against advertising, developing their critical thinking focuses precisely on the ages between four years and pre-adolescence, a range of age in which children are more sensitive to advertising impacts.
Patricia Núñez de Arenas