Child Psychology and Advertising

Who benefits the most from advertising?

If you have noticed young children, you should know the boundaries of their world. Their world starts with them and ends with them. That is how big their world is. They think they are the world and everything around them should revolve around them. They should be the focus and the attention. That is why sometimes the first child who is the center of attention becomes jealous on the arrival of a new sibling. The child doesn't want to share the world of undivided attention and focus.

When they are toddlers and in their first year, the eye is trying to adjust and learn how to focus on an object. The fist eight months are spent in this practice. When they open eyes to the world, a huge colorful world full of strange objects awaits them and they try to use their five senses not only to develop their senses of sight, touch, hearing, taste and smell but also to learn and grasp what they are surrounded with.


If you see young toddlers in the first year or even the older children like five or six year olds, anything full of images,sound and color attracts them. The television tops this list and so does advertising full of quick moving images and strange sounds.

Young children are the most easy catch for advertisers and advertisers understand this. Anyone who has been around a child in a commercial break during the cartoons knows the child's response as soon as the advertisement ends. Yes, it is simple. Can I have that ?

Young children are the best catch for advertisers

Fordham University in New York city conducted a developmental psychology study in 2008 in which 6-year-olds were asked to explain the purpose of advertising, given four choices:

1.  Don't know
2.  For a break
3.  For information
4.  To persuade

The group of kids split their answers among the first three choices, with not one child in the study saying that the purpose of advertising is to persuade. The conclusion on the results was that the kids see advertising as a benefit to them (consumer) and not the seller. Children seeing commercials as a benefit at this tender development age means that they are developing a concept, a fact and a hard habit to break as they grow into adults which helps the advertisers who already understand this benefit.

The research outlines a simple fact which most of us might know but when we have children, we certainly cannot recollect the time we were their age and we miss out on what is going in their minds. If your child is stubborn and has learnt to get his/her way by throwing tantrums, he will most likely make you buy it. When that happens, we are so blank that we don't know how to change it. We don't have the energy and the time to invest in breaking their habit. Whenever we are in a supermarket where they see their advertised products, they will create a chaos if they have not been trained and taught.

This is one way to teach them an important fact about the world and business tactics. To avoid getting into a difficult situation, just follow simple rules from ground zero. Contain the situation before it arises.

When your child is between 2 and 3 years, talk to them when the advertisement ends.

1. Ask them a question about what is a commercial or advertisement ?
2. Explain what is the purpose of it ?
3. Try to teach with a practical example if you can. 
4. Tell them it is not free as they think.

Stop them from making wrong impressions since these will be carried with them in the future. You spend less time if you do it in the early years and cultivate a strong character of understanding and reasoning.