Critical review of the influences of consumerism on children 7-11 or young people 11-16

UP608862

BH (Honours) Childhood and Youth studies C1989F

Education Society and the curriculum

"Critical review of the influences of consumerism on children 7-11 or young people 11-16

Dr Sue Parfect

Essay

1320 Words

28.11.13

When is it fair to advertise to children? This debate has gone back and forth between government, theorist and many organisations. This debate has focused mainly on deciding on which age children and young people develop an acceptable level of persuasion and are able to use this understanding to evaluate the advertising product or service, as increasingly new findings from neuron-science (Plassmann, Ambler, Braeutigam & Kenning 2007) and psychology have shown that the way different organisation advertise to children and young people manipulate their behaviour through changing their outlook towards these products (Moss and Baldwin 2005).

The intentions of this essay are to outline what consumerism is and to critically review the influences of consumerism on children aged 11-16.

"Get fat on Lorings Fat-ten-u and corpula foods"; ...

An electronics store in a shopping mall in Jakarta...

English: anti-consumerist graffiti

Many studies have been carried out to see what the results of advertising has on children are, these studies have focused on the following three areas: cognitive, affective and behavioural. These studies which have been done have implemented the original Piaget's (1960) known as the theory of cognitive development to direct their research. In Piaget's theory (1960) there are four main age stages, where children would progress through each stage so that they would be able to achieve the ability to understand the selling intentions of advertisement. Piaget named these four stages as sensorimotor stage which is aged between 0 to 2 years, pre operational stage aged between 2 to 7 years, concrete operational stage aged between 7 to 12 years and formal operational stage aged 12 years and plus (1960). A study that has been done has shown that children in the concrete operational stage are increasingly...