The Psychology of Childhood Consumerism: You Are What You Buy

Allen D. Kanner, Ph.D.

The last decade has seen an explosion in advertising to children, which not only has increased in size but in sophistication and scope. We are just beginning to understand the enormous harm that is being done to our children by this commercial onslaught. There are at least three major ways that the commercialization of childhood does harm. They are:

• Advertising promotes harmful products. We see this in the enormous number of commercials that promote unhealthy food, such as junk food and cola, and violent toys and media which are linked to violent behavior.

• Advertisements themselves present images, ideas and values that are harmful to children. A classic example is the stereotypical ways that girls and boys are presented in many commercials.

• Advertisements have a cumulative harmful impact of children. This is the aspect of advertising that receives the least amount of attention and on which I would like to focus today.

      In regards to the cumulative harm of advertising, we need to ask ourselves what it means when children are exposed to thousands of commercials a day, every single day of their lives. Each advertisement can be understood as a kind of transaction or experience that a child is having, and we need to understand the nature of this transaction. Indeed, when children are being advertised to, they are being objectified in a very specific manner. Their value and worth is being reduced to their capacity to spend money or to buy something. With each commercial, they are being objectified once more as a consumer.

      The process of being objectified as a consumer is an interesting one. On the one hand, the transaction promises the child that something good will happen to her or him if s/he purchases the advertised product. On the other hand, by the time children are eight or nine they understand that their behavior is being manipulated and that they are not being told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Younger children, on the other hand, believe what they are told and are thus being subjected to the disappointment and resentment that comes from finding out that they were not spoken to truthfully.

      Eventually, children need to develop cynical reactions and defenses to advertisements. Such defenses include the false belief that they are not being affected by commercials. It is clear that this belief is false because children continue to purchase more products each year. But since no one wants to be made a fool of, it makes sense that children will come to believe they are immune to the commercial message.

      As children are exposed to more and more advertising, they come to believe the commercial message that they are valuable because of their purchasing power. Thus, their self-image or their identity becomes partially based on this belief and they come to judge themselves in terms of what they can buy or how much money they have. They also, of course, come to judge other people by the same criteria. As children adopt the materialistic values that are embedded in commercials, they also come to identify themselves more and more as consumers.

      Part of identifying as a consumer includes the belief that one can be treated as a consumer anywhere and anytime. Thus, children become used to being advertised to in school, in bathrooms at rock concerts and just about any other place they go. For many adults, there are still areas of life where we would feel violated and outraged if advertisements appeared. One such area might be a religious service. But as children come to identify themselves more strongly as consumers, and become used to being treated as such by advertisers, they lose any sense that advertising is inappropriate to or that it violates and ruins certain kinds of activities.

      As children's resistance to advertising is broken down from an early age, while materialistic values are reinforced daily, we need to ask ourselves what kind of adults these children will become. As psychologists, parents and others who are concerned about the welfare of our children, we need to ask ourselves whether we want their values, their identity and their vision for the future to be formed by the marketing departments of large corporations. Or do we want our family values to come from elsewhere?