Middle Years (7-12)

Saturday morning cartoons have always been a ritual in my family. As a child, I remember looking forward to that 1 day a week when we would wake up early to join Marshall, Will and Holly in the “Land of the Lost,” or help those meddling teens solve yet another Scooby-Doo mystery. Now, my own children share the same enthusiasm for Saturday-morning TV, but as a parent, it’s a whole new show.

    These days, I wonder which the kids enjoy more, the cartoons or the commercials? Who can blame them when they see other kids skipping through a fruit-flavored rainfall, pint-sized, plastic action figures that come to life, or giant tigers helping the littlest guy on the team hit a whopping home run just because he ate a certain cereal? And rather than being able to steal a few undisturbed moments to enjoy my morning coffee, I’m cornered into listening to my child’s version of the “Blendy Pens” ad (including the disclaimer), and am buried under slips of paper with 800 numbers and website addresses where all these wonderful things come from.

    The truth is, Saturday mornings are no longer a day off for parents. Instead,  they have become an opportunity to teach kids an important lesson about media literacy.

An onslaught of messages
    The constant barrage of advertising children are faced with today: an estimated 40,000 TV commercials annually, and more in school bathroom stalls, grocery carts and on their computer screens, has brought this topic into the spotlight. It has even become the subject of a policy statement from the American Academy of Pediatrics. Yet the responsibility of teaching kids to distinguish between reality and fantasy in advertising lies almost solely with parents.

    In many Western countries, such as Australia, the UK and Canada, media literacy is taught in schools, but surprisingly, not here, says Dr. Victor Strasburger, a professor of pediatrics at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine and co-author of the AAP Policy statement. Some nonprofit organizations, such as the New Mexico Literacy Project, provide and promote training for teachers who want to bring the topic into the classroom, and luckily, there are also many resources parents can tap into with a simple Internet search. If this is a subject that needs discussing in your home, here are a few tips to get you started:

    > First, limit screen time and your child’s access to it, says Strasburger. The suggested limit for both TV and computer time combined is 1 to 2 hours per day.

> Don’t put a media hookup in the bedroom if you want to have better control over your kids’ media habits.

    Additionally, Strasburger suggests taking a preventative approach toward teaching your kids about advertising.
    “We may think that by the time they’re 7 to 12 years old, they are more intellectually capable of understanding advertising, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t susceptible to it. And if you wait to talk about it until they see something attractive on TV, you’re dead in the water,” he says. “You’ve got to get their skills honed way ahead of time.”
    
 So, where do you start?
    Teresa Jolls, president of the Center for Media Literacy in Malibu, suggests using questions. Her organization publishes a pamphlet that can be downloaded from their website, medialit.org, for free, along with other teaching tools parents can use.
    “Sometimes kids don’t understand that what they’re watching is an ad,” explains Jolls. “So when you watch TV together, ask them, ‘What is this and why is this message being sent?’ when you see an ad come on.”

    You can take the conversation one step further by deconstructing an ad image and looking for what’s real and what’s not. For example, Jolls says she once encountered a group of kids who quickly lost their excitement about a new fruit-flavored candy when they realized 1 white-colored layer of the candy was supposed to look like milk.

    It’s never too young to start teaching kids media literacy, stresses Jolls, but as kids reach the middle years, she also thinks it’s important for parents to teach them that they “vote” for advertisers with their dollars. While it might not work for everyone, allowing a child to buy something in order to learn a lesson can sometimes be an effective method.

    It was a $29.95 ballot in our house. When I finally came across the Blendy Pens set at a street fair and bought it for my 9-year-old, it didn’t take her long to realize that the pens were difficult to use and beautiful artwork was not guaranteed. Although it fell short of her expectations and left her disappointed, it definitely taught her (and her 2 brothers) to be more critical about those Saturday-morning commercials. As an added bonus, it gave me back peace and quiet on Saturday mornings. At least temporarily.

    Michele Piazzoni is a contributor to OC Family Magazine.

Behind the scenes

Teaching your kids media literacy can be a lot of fun and games, too. Check out pbskids.org/dontbuyit/advertisingtricks for activities that will open up your child’s eyes to the secrets of advertising. They can discover what goes into a hamburger made to be photographed (hint: white glue is just one ingredient), learn how to become an ad detective, create their own cereal boxes and play a game that teaches them how to create their own ad.