The politics of advertising to children

Abstract

A key issue connected with advertising is whether advertising is harmful to children. Unfortunately, research is not a good moderator of the debate, since research cannot easily discover or qualify harm — especially harm shown to have been done over a period of several years. The concerns are specific: such advertising can be harmful because it might be responsible for a long-term negative behavioural and personality change in a child, or for damage done to interpersonal relationships, generally within the family, or, more controversially, as the unfair exploitation of young and gullible minds with inappropriate material. It is significant that this last concern brings the argument perilously close to notions of direct censorship.