Growing Up under Corporate Capitalism

Growing Up under Corporate Capitalism: The Problem of Marketing to Children, with Suggestions for Policy Solutions 01/05/2016

Tim Kasser∗ Knox College
Susan Linn Boston Children’s Hospital & Harvard Medical School

Bronfenbrenner’s ecological model of development suggests that children are affected by the economic system under which they live. Corporate capitalism is one such economic system, and evidence suggests that the focus on profit and power characteristic of deregulated, competitive forms of capitalism can suppress how much citizens prioritize the values that support the nurturing of children. One manifestation of this capitalist ideology is the practice of marketing to children, a practice known to be associated with a variety of negative outcomes for children. We present empirical evidence supporting these claims and conclude by proposing numerous policies aimed at reducing children’s exposure to marketing. The policies, many of which have widespread public support, can be implemented in a number of types of institutions that directly or indirectly affect children, including professional organizations, schools, businesses, and all levels of government.

This article explores one relatively ignored fact about children’s development: They grow up under economic systems. This fact, as we hope to show, has a variety of implications for children’s development and well-being. In particular, we will argue that children who grow up under certain forms of the economic system known as corporate capitalism are subject to a variety of deleterious environmental influences. We focus in this article on commercial marketing that is directed at children and/or that uses advertising techniques known to appeal to children. We conclude by proposing an array of policy solutions to decrease the extent to which children are targeted by marketing.

The Ecological Model of Children’s Development

One helpful framework for thinking about the influences of an economic system on children derives from Urie Bronfenbrenner’s widely cited 1977 American Psychologist article and later, 1979 book, The Ecology of Human Development. In these writings, Bronfenbrenner presented an “ecological model” in which he argued that developing humans exist within a “nested arrangement of structures, each contained within the next” (1977, p. 514). Bronfenbrenner’s conceptualization of this nested structure encouraged psychologists interested in child development to begin studying not only the proximal aspects of the environment that directly impinge upon the child, but also the more distal features of the broader environment in which the proximal environmental systems were nested.1

Bronfenbrenner (1977, 1979) labeled the most proximal environments that influence the child the microsystem. The microsystem encompasses the “immediate” settings that actually “contain” the child, i.e., settings that directly impinge upon the child at particular moments. These are the sorts of environments that most psychologists tend to study: events that take place in the home, at school, and in one’s neighborhood, where developing individuals have direct interactions with other people (e.g., parents, teachers, peers) and/or with particular stimuli (e.g., second-hand smoke, television shows, fun playgrounds).

At a somewhat more distal level is what Bronfenbrenner (1977, 1979) called the exosystem. This level encompasses the structures of the environment “that do not themselves contain the developing person but impinge upon or encompass the immediate settings in which that person is found, and thereby influence, delimit, or even determine what goes on there” (Bronfenbrenner, 1977, p. 515). For example, few children directly interact with government agencies, but if the local, state, and/or national government cuts spending on schools, children will probably experience crowded classrooms taught by harried teachers who have fewer concrete resources to provide the children. That is, children’s microsystem experiences in school are influenced by occurrences at the exosystem.

The third, most distal, layer of environment is the macrosystem, which “refers to the overarching institutional patterns of the culture or subculture, such as the economic, social, educational, legal, and political systems . . . ” (Bronfenbrenner, 1977, p. 515, emphasis added). Macrosystems “are carriers of information and ideology” that influence occurrences at the exosystem and microsystem levels. So, for example, if the macrosystem of a particular culture is imbued with religious fundamentalism, structures at the exosystem level will reflect this ideology, and policies may be developed that require schools to teach certain religious ideas, thereby influencing children’s experience in the microsystem.

Corporate Capitalism: A Dominant Feature of 21st Century Macrosystems

As noted above, economic systems are among the aspects of the macrosystem that Bronfenbrenner (1977, 1979) believed might influence developing humans. Today across most of 21st century Earth, the dominant economic system is capitalism. As such, a full understanding of the factors that influence children’s optimal development and well-being requires studying how this particular aspect of the macrosystem influences the exosystems and microsystems that, in turn, more directly affect children’s development.

While various forms of capitalism exist, they all share a certain basic ideology and certain structural features (see Kasser, Cohn, Kanner,&Ryan, 2007, for further details). First, the system prefers private ownership to commonly shared property; from capitalism’s point of view, it is better for each family in a neighborhood to own a lawnmower than for a group of families to share one. Second, people living under capitalism are encouraged to pursue their own self-interests, primarily the accumulation of wealth and possessions. Third, capitalism holds that, in a free market relatively unencumbered by governmental regulations, competition will work like an “invisible hand” to create the highest quality and lowest-priced goods and services. These three basic principles have historically worked together to create remarkable economic growth,which, in turn, has yielded jobs forworkers, useful and desirable things for consumers to buy, profit for businesspeople, and tax revenue for governments.

This brief overview shows that many humans today are surrounded by a capitalist macrosystem ideology that encourages competition, consumption, selfinterest, wealth, status, and possessions. Put in terms of Schwartz’s (1999) wellknown theory of cultural values, capitalism encourages mastery values, which concern being successful and ambitious, and hierarchy values, which concern authority, status, and wealth (Kasser et al., 2007; see also Kilbourne, Dorsch, McDonagh, Urlen, & Prothero, 2009). As such, the exosystems and microsystems that more directly influence children are likely to be imbued with these values. But that is only part of the story.

Beginning in the late-1980s and early-1990s, Schwartz (1992) began demonstrating that values exist in dynamic systems, such that some values are relatively compatible with each other, being fairly easy to pursue simultaneously, whereas other values are in relative tension, being in conflict with each other. Figure 1, based on data collected from thousands of individuals across dozens of nations around the world (Schwartz, 1999), shows these dynamics at the level of the culture; values that are relatively consistent with each other are placed beside each other in the “circumplex,” whereas those that are in relative conflict are placed on opposite sides of the figure. As can be seen, mastery and hierarchy values are relatively consistent with each other; this is sensible, as many of the pathways that cultures and people take to enact the aims of success and ambition are easily pursued alongside pathways to attaining power and wealth. A focus on mastery and hierarchy values, however, comes at the cost of a relative deprioritization of values for harmony (e.g., world at peace, unity with nature), egalitarianism (e.g., equality, honesty, social justice), and intellectual autonomy (e.g., curiosity, creativity).

Kasser et al. (2007) integrated Schwartz’s (1992, 1999) value model, Grouzet et al.’s (2005) similar goal circumplex, and findings from Burroughs and Rindfleisch (2002) to propose the hypothesis that to the extent a culture organizes its economy around deregulated, free-market capitalist practices (as occurs under American corporate capitalism in particular), its citizens would not only place a relatively high priority on the aims reflected in mastery and hierarchy values but would also place relatively lower priority on the aims reflected in harmony, egalitarianism, and intellectual autonomy. This hypothesis has been tested in two studies using objective indices of the extent to which relatively wealthy capitalist nations pursue a highly deregulated, neo-liberal, competitive form of capitalism. In the first, Schwartz (2007) used ameasure of how much organizations (e.g., business firms) in a capitalist nation coordinate with other organizations (e.g., unions, government) through strategic, planned interactions (e.g., Germany and Austria) or through free market competition (e.g., the U.S. and other Anglo nations; Hall & Gingerich, 2004). Kasser (2011a) used the Index of Economic Freedom (developed by the Wall Street Journal and The Heritage Foundation), which averages nine measures of economic freedom (e.g., Business Freedom, Investment Freedom, Property Rights) to obtain an overall score for nations. As seen in Table 1, results so far support Kasser et al.’s hypothesis: The more that a nation has a “competitive” or “economically free” form of capitalism, the more that its citizens value mastery and hierarchy and the less that they value egalitarianism, harmony, and intellectual autonomy.

What are the implications of this theory and research for children growing up under capitalism? As mentioned earlier, Bronfenbrenner (1977, 1979) held that the macrosystem is composed in part of basic institutional patterns, including economic patterns, and ideologies, including values. A child developing in a very competitive, deregulated capitalist nation would be surrounded at the macrosystem level by an ideology based on the relatively high prioritization of mastery and hierarchy values and the relatively low prioritization of harmony, egalitarian, and intellectual autonomy values. Such institutional patterns and ideologies would wend their way from the broad macrosystem level to influence the exosystems and microsystems that more directly impinge upon the child. Unfortunately, prioritization of the values consistent with capitalism is unlikely to bode well for children’s well-being, as such values crowd out the values that support nurturing and caring for young people (see Figure 1).

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Kasser (2011b) tested this idea in a sample of 20 wealthy nations that varied in the extent to which their citizens prioritized hierarchy relative to egalitarian values and mastery relative to harmony values; Japan and the United States were especially oriented toward hierarchy and mastery values, respectively, whereas Italy and Finland were especially oriented toward egalitarian and harmony values, respectively. Several indices meant to represent “a nation’s concern for the wellbeing of present and future generations of children” (Kasser, 2011b, p. 208) were also collected. These indices included the generosity of the mandatory parental leave laws in the nation (which varied from no guaranteed paid leave in the U.S. and Australia to 52 weeks at full wages in Austria); the amount of advertising that television stations directed at children (varying from 13 minutes per hour in Australia to 1 minute per hour in Sweden and Norway); and the children’s wellbeing (UNICEF, 2007, varying from the lowest well-being in the United Kingdom to the highest in the Netherlands). As predicted, nations’ values were significantly correlated with these indices of caring for children, such that nations more focused on hierarchy and mastery values had children with lower well-being, provided less generous parental leave, and directed more advertising at children than did nations more focused on egalitarian and harmony values.

To make the processes underlying these findings more concrete, consider, for example, Kasser’s (2011b) finding regarding parental leave laws. This correlation between cultural values and specific policies can be understood via several pathways involving Bronfenbrenner’s (1977, 1979) nested levels. Most obviously, the capitalist value ideology present in the macrosystem would influence the exosystem, leading governmental organizations to pass laws that encourage parents to return to work sooner (to maximize income and help employers make a profit) rather than to pass laws that make it affordable for parents to stay at home and care for their babies. Further, at the exosystem level, business organizations would be more likely to support weak parental leave laws, as doing so would increase their profits. Further, parents themselves would experience many microsystem environmental influences over the course of their lives (from their own parents, coworkers, friends, and employers) that make it seem perfectly normal to return to work and wage-earning rather than to spend more time with a child after it has been born. As a result, developing children’s experience in their family microsystem would be characterized by spending less direct time with parents, by having parents who are fairly busy as they try to balance careers with home responsibilities, and by exposure to implicit and explicit messages that working for money should take priority over family.

There are numerous other ways in which a capitalistic macrosystem ideology might affect children by filtering down to the exosystem and microsystem levels. Here are two more examples:

(1) At the macrosystem level, hierarchy values suggesting that it is proper for money, status, and possessions to be unequally distributed in a society would lead to policies and practices that create high levels of wealth and income inequality, via wage-earning practices among businesses and taxation policies among governmental institutions. In turn, wide disparities of income and wealth would affect the experiences of children in their home, school, and neighborhood microsystems.

(2) The focus on economic growth, wage-earning, and profit inherent in the capitalist macrosystem ideology would lead to a belief that the purpose of educating young people is to prepare them to enter the workforce, rather than to prepare them to be well-rounded, healthy citizens in a democracy. The former purpose would lead to a focus on imparting marketable skills, whereas the latter would include teaching topics that are perhaps less likely to yield high-paying jobs, such as the arts and humanities, philosophy, and physical education. To the extent the capitalist ideology dominates, students in elementary schools would experience diminishing opportunities for recess, art, music, etc., and children in preschool would spend less time learning through hands-on, creative and exploratory play. Further, policies would be developed in state governments to focus higher education around the priorities of business, and a college education would increasingly come to be seen as an “investment” designed to prepare young people for economic success rather than a way to prepare them for successful citizenship in a democracy (see, e.g., Deresiewicz, 2015; Harris-Perry, 2012; Keldermain, 2015).

We could add more examples, but it is far beyond the scope of this article to attempt to summarize all of the influences of capitalist macrosystem ideologies and institutions on the exosystems and microsystems that directly impinge upon developing youth. We have therefore chosen depth over breadth, and focus the remainder of this article on one key feature of the developing child’s environment that is particularly relevant to the macrosystem influence of corporate capitalism: Commercial marketing that is directed at children and/or that uses advertising techniques known to appeal to children.2

A Brief History of Marketing to Children in the United States

Modern forms of marketing and advertising began in the first half of the 20th century when companies’ capacity for mass production required higher levels of consumer demand to make increased production of goods more profitable. Although children were sometimes directly marketed to during this era, the popularity of television in the 1950s led to a substantial rise in child-targeted marketing. By the 1970s, this expansion of consumer culture led child advocates to become concerned about the influence of marketing on children, and some laws were passed in the 1970s to protect children from certain forms of television marketing (e.g., Federal Communications Commission, 1974; seeWesten, 2006). By 1978, research on television marketing to children led the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to propose banning television marketing to children under the age of 8 and prohibiting junk food marketing to children under the age of 12. Corporations, perceiving these proposed bans as potentially reducing corporate profits from child consumers, spent a then-unprecedented $16 million to fight back. Their lobbying efforts were so successful that that the U.S. Congress not only rejected the FTC’s proposal, but also severely limited the FTC’s power to regulate marketing to children in the future, making such a ban impossible (Westen, 2006).

Corporations gained further access to children when President Ronald Reagan’s administration began privatizing and deregulating industries of all kinds— including children’s television. One key change allowed for the creation of television programming for the sole purpose of selling toys; within 1 year, all 10 of the top-selling toys in the U.S. were tied to media programs (Linn, 2004). In addition to pulling back from industry regulation during the 1980s, the federal government also decreased its funding of public institutions (like schools and public television) and urged corporations to step into that role instead (Molnar, 1996).

Other changes in children’s environments at this time made it easier for marketers to market directly to children. In the 1970s and 1980s, women entered thework force in greater numbers, and rising divorce rates led tomore single parent families; these broader changes unfolding at the macrosystem and exosystem levels translated intomore children on their own after school without parental supervision (i.e., a different microsystem for children). For parents who were worried that their offspring would be unsafe out on the street, a seemingly benign solution was to entertain them at home with television. As a result, media producers and marketers found a ready audience of 8- to 12-year-old children (“latchkey” children to those in social services, “tweens” to those in the marketing industry) and began creating advertising-supported programming and products especially for them (Chicago Tribune, 1988).

This combination of lack of regulation and ease of access made children an increasingly attractive audience for marketing, especially once market researchers discovered that, in addition to having their own money to spend, children influenced their family’s spending patterns. In 1992, James McNeal, a psychologist often cited as the “father” of the modern child market, estimated that children in the U.S. influence $137 billion in family spending; more recently, he put that estimate at $1.2 trillion (Horovitz, 2011). The fact that children are, by definition, at the start of their lives was also of interest to marketers, as they could begin inculcating brand loyalty at an early age; lifetime brand loyalty is quite lucrative for companies, estimated as worth $100,000 per customer (Azoulay, 2000). As Mike Searles, then president of Kids “R” Us, put it in the late 1980s, “ . . . if you own this child at an early age, you can own this child for years to come . . . Companies are saying, ‘Hey, I want to own the kid younger and younger and younger’” (Harris, 1989).

Not surprisingly, companies began spending much more on marketing to children: Estimates are that in 1983 around $100 million was spent (Schor, 1999), compared to over $17 billion in 2006 (Horovitz, 2006). The sophistication of marketing efforts has also increased. For instance, today marketers employ what they call a “360 degree strategy” aimed at surrounding children with messages about brands and products on televisions, tablets, cell phones, and computers (Chester & Montgomery, 2007), as well as on “wearable” technologies (Gaudiosi, 2015). Companies also use characters from films, TV programs, “apps,” video games, and other media to market the food that children eat, the toys that they play with, and the clothes that they wear. Toys and stuffed animals are manufactured embedded with technology capable of engaging children in conversations that can be recorded and beamed up to “the cloud” to be analyzed and modified, providing new opportunities for marketers to embed personalized advertising in children’s play (Halzack, 2015). On the Internet, companies invite children to “interact” with their brands digitally for much longer than a traditional 30-second commercial; these interactions can range from branded social media activities to playing videogames embedded with advertising to playing digital “advergames” that are built around a brand or product (Chester & Montgomery, 2007) to company-sponsored contests on branded Web sites that encourage children to submit photographs or artwork as part of a brand promotion (Center for Digital Democracy, 2014). And in 2015, Google released a YouTube Kids product that allows children to watch a collection of “channels” marketed as “safe” for children. An early review of the available content on YouTube Kids found many instances of advertising on these “channels” that violate the few existing regulations for marketing to children on television, as well as current FTC guidelines (Georgetown Law Institute for Public Representation, 2015). For instance, when YouTube Kids debuted, McDonald’s had its own channel that featured commercials for Happy Meals, as well as ads disguised as news programs (e.g., “What are Chicken McNuggets made of?”).

At the same time that children are exposed to increasingly sophisticated forms of marketing, fewer ad-free microsystem environments exist. For instance, as public institutions like schools face inadequate funding from government sources, they have turned to corporations for revenue, often in exchange for allowing corporations to market to their students. Yet, such quid pro quo contracts are rarely lucrative: One survey found that 87.5% of school officials reported that their schools would not be forced to reduce programs if advertising were prohibited (Molnar, Garcia, Boninger, & Merril, 2006). Nonprofit organizations serving children have also received financial support from corporations in return for marketing brands to children, as was the case in 2013 when the Girl Scouts of America accepted $2 million from the Mattel toy company and began promoting the Barbie doll brand on their Web site, materials, and scout uniforms (Crary, 2014). Sometimes children are even marketed to by their friends, as when corporations provide new products to prescreened popular children on the condition that they engage in “peer to peer marketing” (Schor, 2004).

Put in terms of Bronfenbrenner’s (1977, 1979) model, we hope readers can see that a variety of changes at the level of the macrosystem (e.g., changes in technology, an increasing focus on the deregulation of industry, etc.) have influenced structures in the exosystem such that, in their microsystems, children are exposed to well-financed, carefully crafted, psychologically powerful marketing messages designed to increase children’s participation in consumer capitalism and to create profits for businesses. Combined with more recent empirical evidence described above showing that those nations that prioritize the values of hierarchy and mastery have more advertising aimed at children (Kasser, 2011b), this historical overview illustrates the extent to which the capitalist macrosystem has led children’s microsystem experiences to be imbued with commercial messages.

Some Ways That Children Are Harmed by Marketing

Research shows that children are especially vulnerable to marketing, in part because it takes many years for them to develop the cognitive abilities necessary to critically evaluate marketing messages (Carter, Patterson, Donovan, Ewing, & Roberts, 2011). Most toddlers are unable to distinguish between commercials and programming (Pearl, Bouthilet, & Lazar, 1982), and while some preschoolers can recognize this distinction, they tend to believe that commercials exist merely to provide breaks in programming (John, 1999). Upon entering kindergarten, the concrete thinking of children leads them to believe in the trustworthiness of the information they see in 15-second commercials for cookies or toys (Levin & Linn, 2004), given that they usually think that the purpose of advertising is to provide information about those products. It is not until around the age of 8 years that most children begin to understand that the purpose of advertising is to sell them something (Wilcox et al., 2004).

But even while 8-year-olds might be able to describe the intent of a commercial as “selling,” they rarely obtain a full understanding that a commercial has a “persuasive intent,” which involves the recognition that an advertiser uses techniques to increase the appeal of a product so as to convince the child to engage in a new behavior, in this case, purchasing (or asking for) the product (Roberts, 1983). This, by the way, was the main reason that the FTC in the 1970s proposed banning marketing to children under the age of 8 years. Since the FTC’s proposed (but failed) ban, research has begun to suggest that many 10- and 11-year-old children also do not fully understand persuasive intent (Carter et al., 2011). And once children become mature enough to understand persuasive intent, that understanding does not seem to influence whether they desire the product being advertised (Christenson, 1982). That is, while older children and adolescents might be more cynical about advertising, their skepticism does not consistently affect their desire to buy the products that they see advertised (Ross et al., 1984).

Not only is marketing to children inherently manipulative of an audience that typically lacks the cognitive capacity to understand the intent of its messages, but marketing also appears to be a causative factor in many problems facing children today. Next, we review the literature relevant to five of these problems: a materialistic value orientation, unhealthy eating, distorted body image, aggressive behavior, and substance use.

Materialistic Value Orientation

As noted above, the smooth functioning of corporate capitalism requires its citizens to believe that wealth and possessions are important aims to strive for in life (Kasser et al., 2007); unfortunately, research shows that the more that individuals prioritize such materialistic values, the lower their personal well-being, the more they engage in risky health behaviors (see Dittmar, Bond, Hurst, & Kasser, 2014, for meta-analytic results), and the worse their educational motivation (Ku, Dittmar, & Banerjee, 2012). Two path analytic studies, using U.S. and U.K. children, show that the more television children watch, the higher their materialism/consumer orientation and the lower their well-being (Nairn, Ormrod, &Bottomley, 2007; Schor, 2004). Another study shows that exposure to marketing in schools (via the Channel One company, which broadcasts news and accompanying advertisements directly into classrooms) is associated with increased levels of materialism/consumerism (Brand & Greenberg, 1994). Experimental (Goldberg & Gorn, 1978) and longitudinal studies (Opree, Buijzen, van Reijmersdal, & Valkenburg, 2014) are also consistent with the conclusion that exposure to advertisements causes increases in materialistic tendencies. Finally, Twenge and Kasser (2013) demonstrated that the rising materialism of American high school seniors was predicted by the rising amount of advertising in their social surround (indexed as the percentage of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product that was due to marketing and advertising expenditures in a given year). Notably, rising materialism among youth has also been associated with rising levels of psychopathology on most subscales of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, including hysteria, hypomania, and psychopathic deviation, among others (Twenge et al., 2010).

Unhealthy Eating

Children’s exposure to food advertising begins early in life and increases as they age (Harris, Schwartz, & Brownell, 2010). The extent of their exposure has also been rising: Preschoolers in 2010 were exposed to 21% more fast food ads on TV than in 2003, and somewhat older children were exposed to 34% more (Harris et al., 2010). In 2009, fast food restaurants in the United States alone spent more than $4.2 billion on marketing to children. Research shows that these marketing effortswork well for companies, as children’s food preferences, brand preferences, food choices, and food consumption are each influenced by marketing (Horgen, Choate, & Brownell, 2001). Further, studies suggest a clear link between exposure to junk food advertising and being overweight (Lobstein & Dibb, 2005).

One 30-second food commercial can affect the brand choices of children as young as two, and repeated exposure has an even stronger influence (Borzekowski & Robinson, 2001). Marketing even affects children’s experience of how food tastes: Given the choice between two offerings of exactly the same food, children said that food wrapped in a McDonald’s wrapper tasted better than food wrapped in a plain wrapper (Robinson, Borzekowski, Matheson,&Kraemar, 2007). Similar results occur for foods associated with media characters like Dora the Explorer (Roberto,Baik, Harris,&Brownell, 2010). In fact, neuroimaging research suggests that children’s brains are literally “branded” by advertising, as exposure to brand logos, such as theMcDonald’s golden arches, stimulates the appetite and pleasure centers of children’s brains in a manner similar to when they are shown pictures of food (Bruce et al., 2014).

Body Image and Eating Disorders

While many marketing messages encourage eating unhealthy foods that contribute to obesity, other marketing messages expose children, especially girls, to dolls and human models that are unrealistically thin, contributing to a distorted body image and the development of eating disorders.

One study, for example, found that girls between the ages of 5.5 and 7.5 years who viewed images of a Barbie doll scored lower on body esteem tests than when they viewed images of a doll more representative of actual adult body shape (Dittmar, Halliwell, & Ive, 2006). In another study, girls between 6 and 10 years old who were randomly assigned to play with a Barbie doll or another extremely thin doll consumed less food afterwards compared to girls who played with Legos or a doll proportioned more like a normal adult woman (Anschutz & Engles, 2010). Because companies are finding even more sophisticated ways to market fashion dolls to young girls, problems with body image are likely to increase as children’s use of digital devices increases. For example, the marketing rollout for a new line of Bratz dolls in 2015 included a Web series, downloadable emojis (i.e., digital “stickers” to insert in mobile games and text messages), and customizable Bratz avatars for digital games (Nagy, 2015).

There are of course ways other than dolls that girls receive messages suggesting that they should be thin. Children’s concerns about body image are linked to media use (Hogan & Strasburger, 2008), probably because across various types of media (including television, video games, magazines, and the Internet), the beauty ideal presented is one significantly thinner than the national norm for healthy women (Dietz, 1998; Hogan & Strasburger, 2008; Kilbourne, 1999; Pipher, 1994). More direct evidence for this association comes from a study finding that adolescent girls’ discontent with their body image is positively correlated with how often they read fashion magazines (which are filled with ads featuring thinner-than-normal models; Field et al., 1999). Similarly, researchers in Italy and Scandinavia have shown that girls with eating disorders are more susceptible to messages about body image and are more psychologically dependent on television than are girls with normal eating patterns (Toro, Salamero, & Martinez, 1994; Verri,Verticale,Vallero, Bellone,&Nespoli, 1997).One of themost telling studies on this topic comes from the island nation of Fiji, where eating disorders were historically extremely rare until television was introduced in 1995, after which time the prevalence of eating disorders quickly increased among women (Becker, Burwell, Gilman, Herzong, & Hamburg, 2002).

Violence and Aggression

Violent media is heavily marketed to children through traditional commercials and licensed products, including toys (Linn, 2004). Even though violence does not increase a cartoon’s appeal to children (Weaver, Jensen, Martins, Hurley, & Wilson, 2001), more violence is present in child’s television shows than in adult programming (Wilson et al., 2002). Promotional spots for upcoming shows during children’s programming are even more violent than the shows themselves, with the former showing an average of 3.46 violent acts per minute and the latter an average of 1.32 acts per minute (Shanahan, Hermans, & Hyman, 2003).

In the United States, movies that the film industry rates as PG-13, containing material which “may be inappropriate for children under thirteen,” and R, where “some material may be inappropriate for children under 17,” have been routinely marketed to very young children through toys, ads during children’s programs, Web sites aimed at young children, and fast food promotions (Fentonmiller, Rusk, Quaresima, & Engle, 2007). In fact, market research on violent PG-13 movies has been conducted with children as young as 7 years old (Fentonmiller et al., 2007). These occurrences are especially problematic today, given that more violence is now allowed in films rated PG-13 than was the case in years previous (Thompson & Yokota, 2004). In 2009, one study found over 5,000 ads on popular children’s television stations corresponding to just five violent PG-13movies and their related merchandise (Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, 2009). What’s more, in 2008, 75% of the highest-grossing R-rated movies were advertised on Web sites that are popular with children under 17; of those, 35% were sites that are particularly popular with children aged 2 to 12 years (Fentonmiller et al., 2007).

In 2000, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Psychological Association, and other major public health organizations collaborated on a review of 30 years of research regarding the impact of media violence on children; they concluded that heavy exposure to media violence is a risk factor for aggression, desensitization to violence, and lack of sympathy for victims (American Academy of Pediatrics, 2000). A more recent review concluded that children who view substantial amounts of media violence are also more likely to view violence as an effective way of settling conflicts (American Academy of Pediatrics, 2009). In addition, research shows that children exposed to violent programming at a young age have a higher tendency to engage in violent and aggressive behavior, including bullying, than do children who are not so exposed (American Academy of Pediatrics, 2009).

This association between exposure to media violence and real-life aggression is particularly strong, stronger even than the link between condom nonuse and sexually transmitted HIV, and nearly as strong as the link between smoking and lung cancer (Bushman & Huesmann, 2000). The negative effects of violent “interactive” media, such as computer and video games, appear to be even greater than the effects of traditional media, such as television and movies (Anderson, Gentile, & Buckley, 2007). A meta-analysis of studies conducted in both Eastern and Western countries concluded that exposure to violent video games (i.e., a product marketed to children) is a causal risk factor for increased aggressive behavior, for aggressive thoughts and feelings, and for decreased empathy and prosocial behavior (Anderson et al., 2010).