Feature Story
The Media Is Replacing Family, Church and Community in Establishing Values

What determines family values today? Too often, the entertainment and advertising media, believes Jean Illsley Clarke, a Minneapolis parent educator and author of several books, including Parenting Press's Time-In: When Time-Out Doesn't Work, and Who, Me Lead a Group? She is also the co-author of How Much Is Enough? for which Parenting Press publishes the Leader's Guide.

Clarke, who has decades of experience, recently visited with the Parenting Press staff, and expressed her concern about the impact of media on children, even the very young. A generation or two ago, a family's values were often influenced primarily by parents, church and school, and to a lesser extent by the larger community in which the family lived. Today, however, the entertainment media—especially electronic media of all kinds—and the marketing industry often have far more significant impact on what parents and kids believe. These industries tell us that we cannot be successful, popular, attractive—whatever—without the products or services they are promoting. They tell us that our self-image depends on these purchases, not from intrinsic values.

Children are exposed to between three and eight hours of advertising in one form or another each day, Clarke notes, reminding us that besides such traditional advertising as broadcast commercials, billboards, soda machine signage and newspaper and magazine ads, kids are influenced by product placement (when name-brand products are featured in movies, television and videos), sponsorships and the wide variety of online ads. Ads in online games alone will soon be a billion-dollar business. Logos and signage on clothing are yet another form of advertising, she reminds us.

The basis of much of this advertising? "FUD," continues Clarke, who defines this as, "Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt: creating the message that you will not be OK if you don't have this product."

The research she's seen indicates FUD is effective: one poll says that 63 percent of American children define their self-worth in terms of what they own.

What also troubles Clarke is that many parents are unaware of so many marketing techniques and its power. For example:

• Marketers pose as teenagers in a teen Internet chat room to promote products
• Kids perceived as "cool" are recruited to distribute samples of a product to other kids
• Games that progress through several levels, each level requiring a new purchase
• Channel One, which gives televisions to some 8,000 U.S. middle and high schools (thus reaching more than 6 million teenagers) when the schools agree to require that students watch a 12-minute daily newscast, including as much as two minutes of commercials for apparel, beauty products, sugar- and alcohol-free beverages, and military recruiting.
• Nickelodean, which markets to even toddlers with its television programming, is now developing 600 casual games for its websites. Early this year, the company reported that its online games attracted 25 million unique users every month. (Competitors include Yahoo Games, which drew 15.5 million uniques that same month, and Electronic Arts and Disney with 12 million each.) These games often feature products such as Pop Tarts and Eggo French Toast and the web site carries other ads.

Adapted from the Fall 2008 issue of Parenting Education Practitioners (PEP) Talk

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