Consumerism in Children

Every time you flip a magazine, change channels, or go online, you are struck with images of models who are super skinny with flashy outfits and have excessive make-up on. Ads not only try to sell their products, but also promote how females should look like. These models are airbrushed and photo shopped which is false advertisement. The media progressively encourages a thinner body image as the ideal for women. We see advertisements every day. Some of these ads use manipulative strategies that influence our choices and spending habits. For example, “One in every three articles in leading teen girl magazines included a focus on appearance, and most advertisements used appeal to beauty to sell their products.”(Teen Health) To grab the viewers’ attention, especially females, they include

On top of this, 69% of girls in 5th-12th grade reported that magazine pictures and runway models influenced their idea of a perfect body shape (only 5% of the female population naturally has the body type portrayed as ideal in advertisement). This is obviously a problem because, growing up, girls everywhere are told that they’re pretty and that being pretty is the most important thing about them and they start basing their worth on their looks. But then, every single woman they see on TV, in movies, in magazines, any woman considered “hot” and “beautiful” doesn’t look like them anymore, which brings on deadly disorders like anorexia and bulumia that wreck the lives of young girls. Since 90% of people with eating disorders are women between the ages of 12 and 25, we should be asking ourselves “what is causing my child to develop destructive habits at such a young age?” The answer is that they’ve been told that the type of body

The media plays a major role in the way our society sets certain standards and forms opinions. No matter where we go, the media is everywhere. The message that the media illustrates today is that “thin is in”. When was the last time you flipped through a magazine or through the television channels without seeing some type of advertisement promoting a new diet or new product being promoted by a super thin model or actress? Young girls are the main targets for new products. It is common for young girls to be obsessed with what is “in”. The message that young girls are getting from the media is that having bones sticking out is the way to look. They then become preoccupied with their bodies and self image. “ The exposure to ideal images coincides with a period in their lives where self regard and self efficacy is in decline, where body image is at its most fragile due to physical changes of puberty and where tendency for social comparison is at its peak” (www.eating-disorders.org.uk/docs/media.doc). The media illustrates to young girls an “idealized” shape which leads to being beautiful, popular, successful, and loved but which is not realistic to have unless you have the “idealized” shape. Therefore, they believe that their lives will be perfect as long as they are thin and have the “idealized” shape. The two main sources of media that reach young girls are television and magazines.

As a teenager, I have spent a decent amount of my life watching television, movies, browsing the Internet and playing video games. This has shaped the way I think. These sources are wonderful ways of retaining information, but we need to be careful of how we receive it. Not all information we perceive on TV and the Internet are safe and trustworthy. I believe that the information that occurs on today’s media shapes people’s mind into thinking a certain way. The commercials and advertisements on TV offer a false impression of people. Stereotypes in all kinds of media create thoughts in our mind that may not be true. Video games, TV and movies have an influence on kids. Even though the media is the place where we get our information from, we need to learn to filter the good from the bad. The media is a contributing factor in shaping our minds through

The message is being sent loud and clear that the body you were born with isn’t beautiful enough. Roder states that, “The average American encounters 3,000 advertisements every day, and spends a total of two years watching TV commercials in their lifetime.” These ads hunt down our self confidence like wolves, shining the light on six foot tall supermodels weighing only 120 pounds . According to the National Center for Health Statistics, the average weight for an American woman is 166.2 pounds, a number that many women see as overweight (False advertising, photoshopping mars our body image). The drastic difference between the reality of teenage bodies and media portrayals only adds to the escalating insecurity among American children. Teens who are insecure about their bodies are more likely to buy beauty and bodybuilding products, new clothes, and diet aids, spending anywhere between $40 and $100 billion (Beverly and Geraldine). For the past few years, much of the media has had its eye concentrated solely on women, this has changed since the 1990s. Young teenage boys have also been victims of unrealistic male physiques, such as the famous series of Calvin Klein underwear ads. (Ballaro, Wagner) Not only do we allow media images to tear

Now more than ever, media has become an ever-present part of everyday life. While certain aspects of media can be positive, such as the increase of social and political awareness among kids, many aspects provide a very negative influence, especially for children. Ellen Goodman described the media as “an increasingly hostile environment” for kids. The media, and television in particular, can negatively shape a child’s view about themselves and their world, from promoting unrealistic standards of beauty to normalizing violence.

When the people you see on television are skinny, it changes how you want to view yourself. Family also pressures girls to be skinny and pretty. Sometimes, pressure at home is worse than ads out in public. “More than 80 percent of 10-year-old girls are afraid of being fat, that girls’ self-esteem drops at age 12 and does not improve until 20, and that that is tied to negative body image.” (Schulten, “Is There Too Much Pressure on Girls to Have ‘Perfect’ Bodies”, The New York Times) Most girls want to be thin because they think men are only attracted to really skinny women. “How did we get to this place where the worst insult you can hurl at

Over the years, body image has been evolving in the lives of many children and teenagers from what they’ve seen on television and in magazines. They believe slim is attractive so they began

One of the major concerns surrounding children's exposure to the media is the detriment to their learning and social skills.

Photo manipulation makes people in the picture more attractive and society wants to live up to that expectation. Stated in the article “Society and Eating Disorders”, “Clearly the media has an influence. Regardless of gender, young people want to look like the body images they see on television, in the movies and in magazines. Television shows featuring thin or very muscular actors make viewers feel like they need to look thin or be super fit in order to be successful. Many actors we see on TV have endured hours of exercise and have deprived themselves of the proper nutrition in order to maintain a thin figure. Some even resort to plastic surgery, liposuction and breast implants. Society is brainwashing young people into believing that being thin is important and necessary. Additionally, television programming promotes weight stigma by stereotyping and making fun of larger characters.” This quote depicts the reason why young people are putting themselves through so much to look good. The bigger society is completely taking over the minds of adolescents. Television shows are a major issue of manipulation also. The actors eat extremely healthy and work out everyday to keep their figure, and young kids want to be able to live up to the expectation of looking like

Many of these project the ideal body type. Many billboards or advertisements in magazines and television show a women who has been heavily photo shopped. It says to try a certain fragrance, skin cream, diet program, or other product to look like the person shown in the advertisement. This leads women to have a negative self image of their body and do negative things to try to make themselves look better like becoming anorexic, buying tons of different products that they see, getting surgery on different parts of their bodies, or other methods that don’t achieve their desired goal and sometimes make them look worse. The truth is that the standard of beauty in those advertisements isn’t achievable, even by the person in the advertisement who was photo shopped. These pictures are photo shopped due to the greediness for money of the producer on the product and it leads to women who hate their body. Television commercials are another based thing because they aren’t censored for the audience watching. Besides channels that have all their shows for kids and have all shows with a rating that is PG or lower, television shows can have any type of commercials. These commercials include commercials for bears or sex boosting supplements like Viagra. It can show an advertisement for another sow on the network that can involve violence, gore, sex, and death. Some shows are supposed to be for all ages but are on channels that aren’t specifically for kid, so they show commercials that are mainly for adults. These commercials can scar kids and exposes them to life that they may never have to experience and if they do, it won’t be for a long time. Popular events on television like the Presidential Debates, the Olympics, and the Super Bowl show these commercials despite the executive producers of the network knowing that many kids are watching. On the internet, advertisements are everywhere. When

As consumerism grows, corporations exploits the high school learning environment with their ads. For years, the companies have sponsored high school sports, libraries, music rooms and even the cafeteria. In a world constantly plagued with advertisements and corporate influences, high schools should avoid falling into these consumerist practices because advertisements stifle learning. Holding education highly, parents enroll their teenagers in high school to learn more about physics, American history, and pre-calculus. Since competition for certain jobs such as doctors, lawyers, and engineers continue rise, education becomes a necessary asset in the world. With impressionable minds, teenagers surrounded by advertisements will learn to buy certain

In 2002 Peterson and Fjellstrom found that in the United States and other leading world countries that children have gained an increased spending power in the families. This study followed a trend showing marketers began marketing their products toward the children not the parents. It has been said that every adult product from “soup to soap” has been scaled down and “funned up” to market to younger children. An increased advertising after school and on saturday morning has been added to market toys and food to children. In a study of nutritional foods and what sells them to children, Feinstein and Lobstein defined a child’s food as any product that includes at least one of the following: a character they see in a familiar cartoon,

This shows that children spend more time involved in the media than they do with their parents and education. This means that the media is imposing a negative impact on children by eliminating important factors in a childs growth such as learning and spending time with family.

Children are also influenced by the media, but their surrounding increase to impact. Children learn by observing, and repeating. By watching family remember or other children, they will repeat what is seen acceptable by the peer or parent. Children want to fit in and want to make their parents proud. In Jill Conway's anthology Margaretw Mead writes “This sense of satisfying one's parents probably has a great deal to do with one's capacity to accept oneself as a kind of person” (303). If parents are reacting to how the media is trying to conform society, they are unaware of the impact they are sending tho their children. It can also be seen in other peers at school. Children are basically shunned if they do not have the latest clothing or look a certain way.