TURN IT OFF!

Recently, I heard the following statistics:

If you eat every meal with your child for a year, you will have approximately 1,000 opportunities to influence his or her eating habits.

I did the math: 3 meals a day times 365 days a year, yup, that’s about right. Wow! Sounds great, doesn’t it? Admittedly, I don’t eat every single meal in a year with my kids, so my 1,000 opportunities will be reduced somewhat, but it’s still a lot, right?

Wrong.

If you have 1,000 opportunities a year to influence your kids’ eating habits, large corporations are estimated to have ten times that amount. The average child, watching television, will see approximately 10,000 commercials a year – and that’s just for food-related products! In fact, the average child between 2 and 12 will see an astonishing 20,000 to 40,000 TV advertisements in one year alone.

And we’re not just talking about the mythical kid we all hear about – the one with a TV in his bedroom – the one our own children cite when told to turn off the TV; “but so-and-so is allowed to watch as much TV as he wants; he even has a TV in his room!” We’re talking about statistically average children – those watching between one and four hours of television daily. And if the four-hour number seems high, let’s be honest with ourselves, most of our children probably do watch more TV daily than we’d like to admit.

So these statistics got me thinking, and I did some research into the amount of TV advertising our children are exposed to. Did you know that nearly 16 minutes of advertising is found in an average hour of prime time television (Minneapolis Star Tribune, 1999)? I didn’t believe it, until I counted one night. In the thirty minutes it took me and my daughters to watch a kids’ TV show, we saw the commercial for a popular drinkable yogurt six times. Yes, six IDENTICAL commercials in one half-hour show. In fact, during one commercial break, the network showed the same ad back-to-back. And there were ads for other products in the mix as well. As if the fates wanted to hammer me over the head with the message, my kids pestered me into buying that exact product – despite the fact they’d never even heard of it, much less tried it before – the next time we went grocery shopping. Point made.

So, what am I going to do now that I have this information? Well, www.mediawise.org has a great tips section, with some very doable suggestions. I’d also recommend the Advertising Standards Canada (ASC) website, with their guidelines for children’s advertisers, as well as its American counterpart, the Children’s Advertising Review Unit (CARU). Keep in mind that these guidelines are written by self-regulated industry associations – in other words, it’s the children’s advertisers deciding how to advertise to children.

Most importantly, though – and this is going to be a tough sell in my home – I’m also going to go cold turkey on TV for a whole week. And here is fate with her hammer again (ouch, my head!) – while doing my research I stumbled across adbusters’ TV turnoff week, which, incidentally, is THIS week – April 24-30. (see www.adbusters.org for more information). I challenge you to join our family on this “mission impossible”! Let’s all try to turn off the boob tube and take a break from those commercials for seven days. Join me in the forums area of urbanmoms.ca to share your opinions on this article, TV Turnoff Week, children’s advertising and other related discussions.

Statistics for this article were drawn from research cited on www.mediawise.org.

Kath is mom to two girls and Calgary team member for urbanmoms.ca. She is also a regular contributor. To comment on this article, join in the forum discussions or email Kath.