It is debatable whether Television advertising directed to small children under age of five should be prohibited or not. These days, many firms advertise their product even toward small children to ensure that they will be a customer when they grow up. Although it is good marketing strategy, when it comes to real effect of this advertisement to the children, it should be banned definitely. Firstly, advertisement, especially food ad toward children under age of five can make them obesity in the future, secondly, most of the time, advertisements contain misinformation or grammar error. So, it can influence children’s knowledge base and lingual ability.
To start with, children under age of 5 are really sensitive, during this age, the best diet for them are home- made food. However, if children constantly watch the food promotion on television, they will likely prefer to eat processed food to eating home-made food. This preference will lead them to be obesity in future. According to a study, children who were constantly watching television advertisement preferred fast food and processed food rather than home-made food or vegetable, and most of them became obesity when they became teenager. Along with obesity, they had several other diseases such as diabetes, asthma and allergy. This showed that many food processing companies exaggerated their food’s taste and hid bad effects of food by using visual and sound effect in advertisement and allured many children to eat them, and It is proven that the advertisement was even more effective for children under age of five. They had much more difficulty in stop eating unhealthy food than those who watched advertisement after they were 5 years old.
On top of that, advertisements often contain misinformation or misuse of the word. They usually do this to make their product stand out from other competing products and to exaggerate the product’s quality. This affects children’s behavior and knowledge base. To illustrate, my uncle was really concerned about his baby because his son, who was only 3 years old, already knew slang terms such as awesome or freaking and even worse terms. My uncle had no idea where he learned such words. He first thought his son learned these terms from his peer group, but later he found that no other children except him uses slang terms. It was much later when he found out his son learned these words from television advertisements, they used words that are not appropriate to children. He stopped his son from watching television and read him a fairy tale. Soon, his son didn’t use slang terms anymore.
To summarize, advertisement directed towards children under age of five should be prohibited because it affects children’s health badly and promote use of slang terms to children |