Every year, the average American child is exposed to roughly 40,000 television commercials.

In the early 1990’s, when the United States spent about $100 million on advertising targeting children, parents and teachers were concerned that a new generation would grow up coveting little more than money and material goods. Today, the country spends some $12 billion annually on such advertising.

Allen Kanner, a psychologist with the Wright Institute, believes that consumer mentality is steadily gaining ground among the country’s young. He contends that children are becoming voracious consumers. When Kanner asks them what they want to do when they grow up the answer he hears most often is: “make money.” And when children talk about their friends, says Kanner, they often speak about them in terms of their clothes, and the brand names they wear without every mentioning personal qualities.

The average age of children advertisers’ target audience continues to fall. Today, even a two-year-old may be exposed to the influence of television and other kinds of advertising. And such advertising is effective. According to studies undertaking recently by Kanner, a three-year-old American child on average can recognize 100 different brand names. Annually, the average American adolescent spends $1,400 on clothes and footwear alone.

Corporate strategies are very much determined by child psychology. James U. McNeal, a scholar at Texas A&M University, concludes that children are of interest to the market and advertisers for three reasons: first, children have their own money and are willing to spend it, often influenced by advertising; second, they have a definite impact on the consumer choices that their parents make; and, third, by the time children become adults, their consumer habits will have formed thanks in large part to the advertising they experienced in their childhood.

In the 1960’s, the parents of children aged 2 to 14 spent a total of $5 billion annually as a result of their offspring’s influence. By the 1970’s, this statistic had grown to $20 billion. In 1984 it rose to $50 billion; in 1990, the children got their parents to spend a neck-snapping $132 billion. McNeal estimates that every year in the aggregate school children aged 6 to 12 possess approximately $15 billion, which they will spend on toys, clothes, candy and breakfast. According to Charles and Schwab, in 2002 the amount of money spent by children and adolescents reached $170 billion. Today, the average American adolescent spends $92 every week.

In 1999, in an open letter a group of 60 psychologists addressed the American Psychological Association (APA), urging the organization to make its opinion known about the effects of children’s advertising. The signatories called for APA to conduct a study on the psychological methods used by advertisers to influence children, publish the results and develop a strategy for protecting children from nefarious effects of commercial manipulation.

Later, a number of such studies were carried out. APA concluded in one of them that television commercials cultivate unhealthy habits in the young. The studies showed that a child 8 or younger was not able to critically assess such advertising and tended to treat it with complete confidence. Similarly, the American Academy of Pediatrics found that children are not able to differentiate between where televised programs end and commercial advertising begin.

Although APA recommends prohibiting all advertising, whose target audience comprises children under eight, no serious measures have yet been taken to limit such advertising. Proponents of children’s advertising refer to children’s rights as consumers. Bureaucrats argue in favor of free speech and free markets.