Children's Demands for
Toys and Food Increase
With TV Time,
Researchers Say
By Dave Murphy
San Francisco
Chronicle
4/4/05
Any parent could
tell you that kids
want stuff they see on
TV, but a study
released Monday by two
Stanford doctors warns
that the more hours
children spend
watching a
screen—including video
games on computers—the
more nagging about
toys and food they
will dish out, for
months and even years.
Which, of course,
can lead to fatter
children and thinner
wallets.
“This is probably
the tip of the iceberg
in the way things are
going,” said Dr. Lisa
Chamberlain, the
study’s coauthor, a
clinical instructor at
Stanford Medical
School and a
researcher at Packard
Children’s Hospital.
“We’re going to see
more avenues of
marketing to kids.”
Researchers began
with several hundred
third-graders from the
San Jose area, then
followed up with the
children 7, 12 and 20
months after the
original assessment.
Chamberlain said they
found that for each
extra hour of screen
time daily, children
would request an
additional toy every
three or four months
over what they
normally would have
asked for—along with
an additional food or
beverage every three
to six months.
“The kids who were
asking more at the
beginning were asking
(even) more at the
end,” Chamberlain
said. Video games were
no exception, he said,
because so many of
them contain ads.
The data were
collected in 2000 and
2001, and the children
averaged 22 hours of
screen time, with
slightly less than
half coming from
television.
Chamberlain said the
concerns should be
more acute today
because more marketing
focuses on children,
for everything from
computers to cell
phones.
She said the data
originally were part
of a television
reduction study done
by Dr. Thomas
Robinson, director of
the Children’s Center
for Healthy Weight at
Packard. The
researchers wrote them
up recently for the
April issue of the
Archives of Pediatrics
& Adolescent Medicine
because of the
increased concern over
childhood obesity and
the marketing of
products to kids.
“In other
countries, marketing
to children is
regulated,”
Chamberlain said. “In
the United States, it
isn’t.”
The children in the
study reported making
about one request a
week for toys and more
than one every two
weeks for food or
drinks.
In December, the
Institute of Medicine,
a national science
advisory panel, said
that most foods and
beverages introduced
and marketed to
children are high in
sugar, salt, fat and
calories. The
institute urged
manufacturers and
restaurants to create
more healthful
products and spend
money advertising
those items.
The institute also
reported that
children, ages 2 to
14, influence families
to purchase $500
billion of goods a
year.
Sometimes parents
don’t know whether
requests for food and
toys come because of
peer pressure or
television, said
Robinson, who is also
an associate professor
of pediatrics at
Stanford University.
He said he was amazed
at how clear the
third-graders were
about where they got
their ideas.
Robinson said, too,
that product placement
has gotten so common
in video games that
children might get
sales pitches that the
parents don’t even
notice. “There’s less
and less of a
distinction between
the different media,”
he said. |
