Gary, at age 12, is an ideal consumer - happy only when he gets more and more new stuff. He didn't get that way by chance. A recent study reported that Canadian kids watch an average of 23 hours of TV a week with commercials capturing 10 of those hours. In the US, a study on media use by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that kids aged 8 to 13 spent over six hours each day plugged in to TV, video games, CD players, radios and computers. Equally important, they're tomorrow's big spenders.
Companies pay child psychologists big bucks to conduct research on how to influence children.
This is just one of a tidal wave of recent books, newsletters and consultants that peel open children's psyches to find ways to create perfect consumers. Tobacco company documents uncovered by lawsuits in the US provide ample proof of cynical campaigns to get kids smoking by the time they're 18 because hardly anyone starts smoking in their mid-20s or later. Teens and pre-teens are targeted by exploiting their normal desires to be independent from parents, and to express their independence by smoking. And it works. Those efforts, Cunningham says, must include enforcement of laws regarding sales to minors, graphic warnings on packages and much higher prices - Ontario and Quebec have the cheapest smokes in North America.