The Relationship between Children and Television
The role of the media in childhood obesity and other eating disorders
has been criticised in the past few years. This has led me to research
into the relationship between children and television focusing on my
hypothesis ‘ Advertising aimed at children shapes their ideas in a
negative way’. My target audience for my research is 6 to 10 year olds
and research methods I have used include a questionnaire, textual
analysis, books, television programmes and the Internet.
My research is mostly focused on obesity in children and the role of
the media in this problem. Since 1980 the proportion of overweight
children ages 6-11 in the UK has tripled and about 15% of 6 to 19 year
olds are overweight. During the same period in which this proportion
increased, there was also an increase in media targeted at children (www.media-awareness.ca).
This fact has resulted in some people blaming the media for childhood
obesity. Researchers have hypothesized ways that advertisements may
contribute to obesity. One of the ways is the food advertisements
children are exposed to on TV influence them to make unhealthy food
choices. A study by Kotz, K et al, showed that during Saturday
morning children’s programmes, there are approximately 8 food adverts
per hour. However, I repeated this study and found there were now 11
food adverts per hour on terrestrial TV on a Saturday morning, which
could be worked out as one food advertisement being shown every five
minutes. I believe television adverts can influence a child’s
purchases as well as their families, and because of this influence, it
results in children making unhealthy food choices, and therefore
becoming overweight and obese. Although ultimately, it is the parents
who make the purchases, studies have demonstrated that from a very
young age, children influence their parent’s consumer behaviour.
Kids represent an important demographic to marketers because they have
their own purchasing power, they influence their parents' buying
decisions and they're the adult consumers of the future. In the 1980s,