So You Think You Can Raise a Brand-Free Kid?

By Colleen Kimmett, The Tyee. Posted November 5, 2007.

Parents, be warned: It takes only a single visit to McDonald's for your child to get hooked on the greasy stuff for life.

Okay, so that's an exaggeration. But the three-year-old son of Angela Verbrugge still remembers his one and only meal under the golden arches. Which has Verbrugge worried.

And Kyla Epstein swears if her young son Max ever wants to eat there, he'll be doing it on his own dime.

These parents aren't raging against the health detriments of fast food. Instead, they are making a conscious effort to limit the amount of branding and advertising their kids are exposed to in all aspects of their lives; what they eat, wear, watch and play with.

It's not easy. Brands are everywhere -- literally.

Disney 24/7

Genevieve McMahon says she experienced an "eye-opening" moment the first time she bought disposable diapers for her newborn daughter Imogen, who was then too small for the cloth variety her parents preferred.

"We were unpacking them to put them in her drawer and realized there were Walt Disney Winnie the Pooh characters all over them," she says.

"It was at that point when we were like, oh wow ... it's everywhere. I mean, she's not even conscious and yet here they are advertising. I'm staring at it everyday. And eventually...she's going to recognize them."

Exactly. In her book Buy Buy Baby: How Consumer Culture Manipulates Parents and Harms Young Minds, Susan Gregory Thomas explores the widespread and controversial phenomenon of using spokes-characters in advertising to young children.

She describes one study in which toddlers are shown a made-up commercial with a mouse character. The researcher's hypothesis? If the mouse was seen eating a certain kind of cracker, when given a choice later, the child would choose those same crackers.

The study didn't support that hypothesis, but what it did demonstrate is the amazing capacity of young children for character recognition. What surprised the researchers is that many children were able to recognize the mouse later, even if they didn't appear to be paying much attention to the TV screen.

Plethora of Dora

"The chief piece of learning that very young children mastered from watching characters on television was the ability to recognize them," Gregory Thomas writes.

Epstein, for one, is clearly frustrated with this kind of character prevalence. She remembers trying to find a Spanish-language picture book for Max, 11 months.

"Everything was Dora!" she exclaims, referring to the popular Dora the Explorer animated kid's show about a 7-year-old latina girl and her friends.

"I don't want all his books to all be TV characters."

Licensed characters are huge moneymakers for companies. In 2005, Winnie the Pooh earned Disney $6.2 billion in retail sales, according to Gregory Thomas, second only to the mouse.

Verbrugge believes all of this merchandising is the real problem, not necessarily the characters themselves.

"They're trying to sell kids other products, from clothing to bedding...there always needs to be something else that they're striving to buy," she says.

"It scares me when I see advertisements that showcase all these different products that show the child being engaged with a toy," she says.

"They're saying all the right things in the voiceover about baby learning and interactivity...yet you just want to take that baby and turn him around to face the mom and have her play a simple game of patty-cake."

Parents as sitting ducks

All the parents interviewed said they feel targeted by advertisers, and indeed, the desire to make one's child happy is a powerful marketing tool.

Verbrugge, who used to work as a consultant on projects related to children's online activities, says she attended many marketing conferences as part of her job.

"It taught me how sophisticated marketers are in reaching people, and more and more how integrated marketing is in everything we see and do," she says.

See more stories tagged with: child raising, brands, advertising

Colleen Kimmett is on staff of The Tyee.

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