Brainwashing Youth : How Advertising Influences Children On Gender Images

No matter where children are or what they are doing they’ll always find some sort of advertisements. It can be when their casually watching television, reading a magazine or just playing games on their computer. Advertisements are different forms of communication whose purpose is to make their product known to the public. Marketers aren’t partial to certain people; they target anyone and every age group, but recently there has been an upsurge of advertisements aimed towards children. In Eric Schlosser’s article, Kid Kustomers, he demonstrates how child advertising has boomed by the tactics marketers use to get children to want and demand certain companies’ products.

At the end of the school day, she gets into the car with dad and he hands her a McDonald’s Happy Meal with a Cuties inside and finally the little girl smiles. As cute as the commercial is, the subliminal message of the two commercials are what concerns me. The boys are playing with cars and using intelligent math language and the little girl is worried about her pretty smile. However, the product in the two commercials are the same but the portrayals of the children in the commercials are vastly different. The commercials are examples of the types of gender-role stereotyping that occurs often in advertisement. Advertisements that push gender role stereotypes on young children should be banned from television. Television advertisement are among the leading ways children are exposed to stereotypes that causes misguided concepts and ideologies associated with sex or gender. Martin Eistend (2010) conducted a meta-analysis study which stated that, “gender stereotyping can lead to negative consequences that restrict life opportunities, particularly for

Many people believe that everything is black and white, especially when it comes to advertisements. What many don’t understand is that everything has an underlining meaning. Every advertisement has been thought out thoroughly to catch the attention of the consumers it is aiming towards. Advertisements aiming towards children has definitely been a topic that many people can’t seem to wrap their mind around. It’s been a topic that many have exposed because of the way marketers are willing to manipulate children in ways that only benefit their own. This whole issue began after the progression of marketing to children during the late 70s and early 80s with the advertisers’ intentions of making children lifelong consumers of products.

A commercial is one of the advertisements that we could see in life. When you turn on television, you could see a lot of commercials before programs start. In Men’s Men and Women’s Women, Steve Craig, an author, claims that “advertisers seem quite willing to manipulate … fantasies and exploit our anxieties, especially those concerning our gender identities.” However, Stan Hope disagrees since he assumes that “the ads he describes are just light hearted to stories designed to entertain, rather than exploit. Consumers are way too smart to be so easily manipulated in any case.” Advertisements could just describe stores for entertainment like Hope said. However, advertisers should think carefully about gender identities because men and women’s favors are different.

Statistics show that today companies spend nearly $17 billion annually marketing to kids. This paper will explore the effect that advertisements have on the growing mind of a child. It paper will support the view of the video “Consuming Kids” in the context that yes in fact advertising to children is a social problem and that adults should understand the seriousness of this matter; and they should also take steps to help the change the environment that their children are part of in-order to build a healthier future for them. The first section of the paper will take glimpses into early, tween and teen ages of a child and examine the social effects of technology and advertisement. The second section of the paper will discuss the

Marketing to children is not a new phenomenon; however, there have been many ethical debates on its rightness; is advertising to children a gentle persuasion of the innocent or a sinister threat to our society? There’s too much as stake if we remain silent and simply assume that marketing companies have our children’s best interests at heart; the truth is they don’t. This paper will explore to implications of marketing to children and the overall effects it has on our society. I will argue that advertising to children is a social problem. In the first part of my paper I will discuss why advertising to children is ethically wrong, I will then discuss what has changed; this will be followed by a discussion as to why it is a social problem and finally, I will conclude my paper by discussing what should be done to change it. Please note this paper is written in the first person as I have children and I have a vested interest in this topic.

Children are highly influential in their younger years and advertisements can change how they view themselves. Take for instance how toys are marketed towards little girls. Most often they tell how feminine and desirable they’ll be if they buy the product in question. Even with how much gender stereotyping has declined, the products being sold to girls are almost exclusively feminine. From dolls, cooking, or princess attire, they still teach young girls that they have to meet traditional womanly roles. They’ll tell them they have to be little princesses that anything remotely boyish is wrong. Unknowingly this can influence children in greater ways than could be imagined. It tells them that if they don’t fit the specific mold they’re being sold they won’t be liked by others. This is often the reason young girls find themselves deterred from pursuing careers in STEM and becoming self conscious about their bodies. Another common stereotype for advertisements marketed towards girls is that they’re always weaker than boys and should leave hard work to them. One toy company is working to break this mold by promoting a line of toys for girls where their female mascot isn’t just interested in being fashionable and pretty. GoldieBlox Inc. desires to keep young girls interested in careers in science, technology, engineering and math claiming that in these industries where men dominate, girls lose interest in these subjects

She backs up that statement by providing the static fact that in 1975, “less than 2% of toys were explicitly marketed to either boys or girls.” She dives deeper into how gender stereotypes and ‘gender norms’ are prevalent in present day society by explaining how marketing plays an influence on society, especially the children. According to the BBC documentary The Men Who Made Us Spend, children now are being targeted as mini consumers and that the average British child sees 10,000 adverts a year! Kessel also claims that advertisements on children’s channels are the “most explicitly gendered thing you’ve ever seen’ and that in the advertisements involving girls, the girls are seen “in a whirl of pink and high-pitched voices” whereas the advertisements involving boys, the boys are seen “[in a whirl of] blue with a backdrop of angry guitar music.” By evaluating how marketing influences children to gender stereotype, she was able to strengthen her argument.

When it comes to advertisements promoting certain toys and products to children, companies are not afraid to advertise gender targeted products, because they know children are vulnerable. A 2017 study report titled “Gendered Advertising to Children: An Analysis of Differences in Male- and Female-Targeted Television Commercials” written by Meredith Ford mentioned that, “When children realize that the toys they see advertised are only meant for one gender, they latch on to that group of children and do not socialize with the other gender. This sets a detrimental precedent for child development and socialization skills.” When children are exposed to media at a young age, their brains first start to develop and they learn to adapt to their environment. As soon as the child is fully developed, however, there is no way of causing them to forget what they learned or were surrounded with whether it was something good or bad. Additionally, and interestingly, children are capable without even realizing that they are pushing themselves away from the other gender because they were vulnerable to learn from the media that their gender is only supposed to like what they are advertising and not the other genders’ products. Sure they may come to the realization that some of the

One single commercial or picture can change a child’s whole life, even a color or single toy can impact the way a kid sees themselves and others. Advertising in children's toys is very stereotypical most of the time, for example, they only show girls playing with dolls and boys playing with trucks. Gender stereotypes in children's toys should stop being advertised, because they teach kids wrong gender roles, they can restrain kids from playing with the toys they want to, and force them to follow a certain stereotypes.

Advertising’s role of creating gender stereotypes then follows children into their teenage years as adverts continue to have an effect on how children’s identities are constructed (Frith and Mueller 92). Advertisements continue to use visual images of men and women to persuade people to purchase certain products (Cortese 57). Advertisements take a product, remove the meaning associated to that product then insert a new meaning in order to create a new cultural meaning ( McFall 66). Advertisements create a new meaning of what it means to be attractive as women shown in advertisements stereotype beauty or attractiveness to be associated with young, slim and perfect flawless body shapes (Cortese 59. This is a problem as advertisements present unrealistic beauty norms by using intensive retouching tools to create perfectly proportionate models (Frith and Mueller 92). Although a very small portion of women actually have the body shapes shown in advertisements, women are

Gender Stereotyping is generalizing attributes or characteristics on roles for boys and girls, especially through children’s advertisements. In America the difference between boys and girls advertisements is quite noticeable and something that should be recognized as a problem. Companies create ads and labels that have their products categorized by gender and shades of colors. This has caused a division in the behavior of girls and boys, and the expectations society expects from each gender. By companies following gender norms, they don’t even recognize those who identify with non-binary genders. This stereotyping digs a bigger whole against gender equality and acceptance, but companies can make a difference in their behavior. A difference that will allow children to see toys, as just toys, and people as equals. No labels on who can play with what or express themselves. Companies should strive to have their commercials and labels to include both genders in the ad, like the country Sweden who has started to stray away from gender norms in their ads. The solution to gender stereotyping in children’s advertisements is to educate the companies on the type of impact they are having on a child’s self-expression and identity, through studies and examination of past commercials, ads, labels, and toys.

Why does advertising exist in the first place? Why have them around if some or the majority of people will just walk straight by then without taking a second glance? Well, you may think advertisement isn't a big deal, but advertisements have a bigger effect on society than you think. Our society of youth is being exposed to plenty more advertisements than ever before because they’re everywhere. Whether at school, online, or wherever you are you can see an advertisement. It's Just like you can't escape them. Now that advertisements went beyond the limits of television, there are more and more ways advertisers target children. Three different ways that advertisers target children are by placing them in schools, putting them in electronic

Advertisements are the powerful means of communications that not only promotes the products, services, goods; but alongside promoting cultural and gender symbols. Advertising has long been criticized for the insensitivity to minorities, women, immigrants, the elderly and a myriad of other groups. This insensitivity in advertising has being adversely affected the societal perception towards these groups particularly women. Too often women are portrayed as either subservient house wives who are only for looking after their husbands, children and in-laws. Their role has further derided by merely portraying them as the objects to satisfy male desires and pleasures. If we believe that advertising has the ability to shape our values and our views of the world, then it is essential that advertisers should become aware of how they portray different groups.

“Identity is a multifaceted concept” (Giddens, Appelbaum, Duneier & Carr, 2013). It is hard to define identity, as it is how people understand themselves and what is important to them (Giddens, Appelbaum, Duneier & Carr, 2013). Identities are complex constructions, as people from different backgrounds will hold different views on the idea of identity. There are two main types of identity: social identity and self-identity. Self-identity is how people view themselves as individuals in relation to the world around them, as it focuses on a person’s characteristics and personality, and social identity refers to the idea of who an individual is, where they came from and their social status within the society. Gender is an important aspect of our social identity as it helps people to conform into a contributing member of society. Unlike sex, which refers to people’s biological differences of being female or male, gender is socially constructed; it is a set of social expectations of how people should act based on their sex (O’shaughnessy & Stadler, 2012, p370). Advertising plays an important role in constructing ideologies and social expectation in society, which has a large influences on what people consider as their gender identity. Ideologies exist solely because the society chooses to believe it, as it is how we make sense of the world (O’shaughnessy & Stadler, 2012, p371). This essay will focus on three advertisements and discuss how advertising influences and reflects women’s