Television Advertising Directed towards Young Children Should Not Be Allowed

張貼日期：Dec 08, 2018 5:45:22 AM

Miranda Chen

There are so many creative and different types of television advertising in this era. From a few seconds to five minutes in length, from detergent, jewelry, pill to political activities, all kinds of products in our daily life can be publicized by TV commercials. It is a good way for the company to sell its commodities, because people can easily remember them due to constant broadcasting of familiar lyrics, songs or slogans. But the problem is if a corporation arranges its commercial in a wrong timing, type and content, it may cause some problems. For example, an unsuitable advertising for children may affect children’s concept and development in the future. So in my opinion, television advertising directed towards young children should not be allowed.

First, TV commercials towards children will cause parents trouble and unnecessary expenses. Parents nowadays are becoming more and more doting, inclined to buy whatever their children ask them to. And TV commercials tend to make products more appealing than they really are or exaggerate their functions, and the children aged two to five lack the ability to identify the reliability of the commercials. So if children see something they are interested in, they may tell their parents to buy it, which increases the parents’ economic burden.

Second, with so many attractive commercials, children will be attracted to TV and end up spending too much time on it. It is widely acknowledged that too much exposure to TV will do more harm than good on children’s mental development and vision. On the other hand, children should be encouraged to do more reading, which has been proved scientifically to be able to foster children’s intelligence development and stimulate their imagination.

Third, children will be misled by some of the stereotypes projected in the advertisements. One of them would be gender stereotypes. For instance, in most TV commercials, nurses are played by girls and cops are played by boys, which may influence their values and interaction with people. Also a study shows that it may lead to serious neglect of the complexity and diversity of people and individuals, because if people who have stereotypes towards something, they may have fixed impression of that thing and they may not open-mindedly accept other ideas or concepts.

As a result, children should not be exposed to too much TV advertising. And because currently Taiwan does not have a commercial norm about children’s program time, there may be too many temptations on TV. And since we can’t assure what TV broadcasts, it is difficult to prevent children from seeing some inadequate commercials that may have negative effect on their development of cognition and character.