The indirect impact of child-oriented advertisements: On mother-child interactions

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Abstract

The Federal Trade Commission (1978) has expressed concern about the direct and indirect effects that commercial food advertisements have on children and families. Based on these concerns, they suggested banning all advertising aimed at young children. The present experiment was designed within the context of concern about the influence of television food advertising on parent-child interactions. It was predicted that mothers whose children viewed a television program with embedded food advertisements would display more control strategies and more power assertion while grocery shopping than mothers of children who were not exposed to advertisements. The results corroborated this hypothesis and, in addition, revealed that children who viewed the food advertisements attempted to influence their mothers' consumerism more than children who did not view the food advertisements. These results were discussed in terms of the importance of considering how television-viewing indirectly influences the quality of parent-child interactions.

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    McDonald's also outpaces the other restaurants in terms of child-targeted advertising, accounting for 70% of televised FF commercials aimed at young children, most of which include references to CPTI toys (Bernhardt et al., 2013). Experimental studies indicate that child-targeted food marketing strategies, including CPTIs with licensed media characters, influence young children's food and taste preferences (Borzekowski & Robinson, 2001; Chernin, 2008; DeDroog, Valkenburg, & Buijzen, 2011; Kotler, Schiffman, & Hanson, 2012; Letona, Chacon, Roberto, & Barnoya, 2014; Robinson, Borzekowski, Matheson, & Kraemer, 2007) requests to parents to purchase advertised foods (Stoneman & Brody, 1981), and short-term consumption (i.e., in a laboratory setting) of advertised foods (Cairns, Angus, & Hastings, 2009; IOM, 2005; Kotler et al., 2012; Roberto, Baik, Harris, & Brownell, 2010). Collectible toys exert an especially strong pull on young children (McAlister, Cornwell, & Cornain, 2011).

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The research reported here was supported by the Science and Education Administration of the U.S. Department of Agriculture under Grant NO. 5901-0410-8-0019-0 from the Competitive Research Grants Office.

Reprints can be obtained from Zolinda Stoneman, Department of Child and Family Development, Dawson Hall, University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30601.

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