Seriously, it does. We realize this when our kids get the gimmes from the marketing machine alerting them what they need to ask for for Christmas, but we overlook the constant day-to-day bombardment of ads about foods.
Interesting how cereals ads outnumber fast food ads by more than half. And while most people (I think) limit fast food meals to one a week or so, we give our kids cereal pretty much every day. It’s one of the foods that are easily mistaken for healthy, but the numbers don’t necessarily bear that out.
We know that sweets aren’t good for kids, maybe we need to take a harder look at the nutritional value of the stuff they get all the time.
This is a real problem. A California city (San Francisco? Sorry, I don’t remember.) enacted an ordinance to ban heavy food marketing to children unless the foods met certain minimal nutritional standards. I was appalled to read some of the comments on the foodie blogs that I follow (that’s FOODIE blogs!) They were mostly variations of “I feed my kids healthy foods and don’t need the government to tell me what to do.”
Some of us tried to explain that the ordinance was to address the MARKETING to kids, NOT banning sales and NOT campaigning against those restaurants–just reducing the amount of advertising aimed at a specific, vulnerable group. Kids.
With that attitude coming from food-conscious blog readers, it might be tough to inform the general public.
OMG. I KNOW. My kids are such suckers for media marketing. They can recite the commercials and infomercials and truly believe everything they see on tv.
Our job, which is exceptionally difficult, is to teach them that it’s not all as good as it looks on tv.
So. Darn. Difficult.
Funny you brought up cereal because I was just thinking about writing a post about how the children of today don’t get to experience the fun we had as kids, digging through the cereal box to find our prize. Sometimes I chose my cereal by the prize. I think people would take a shit fit on companies saying it was a lure and would probably make some law that you can’t give a kid a prize in cereal.
The bottom line is we as parents make the choice to buy or not buy the cereal. My kids always asked for TV dinners and Chef Boyardee, I never bought it and they were fine. They did however ask for cereal. We had cereal Mon-Fri and I usually cooked breakfast on Sat and Sun. With all the things that can hurt our children, don’t worry yourself about making your life easy in the morning by giving them cereal. As long as they are learning good eating habits at other times, they’ll be fine.
OK I need to go write a post because I’ll just write here forever-
great post! I love seeing the facts graphically-Visual learner. I cant believe the 8-12 range is where they target the most. I have a rule we don’t buy what we see on TV, does not always work but it is a start. As a kid there was one day a year we got the cereal we wanted out birthday .. I always got cookie crisps.