Social scientists and child advocates say that marketing to children manipulates the defenseless. Marketers say kids are people, too, and deserve the same attention as any other consumer. Meanwhile, parents are left to figure out how to guide their children through a commercial culture. It's a jagged battle line that often pushes its way into public discussion, most recently in September, when entertainment industry leaders testified before a Senate committee about marketing violence to children. We're mainly valuing them as consumers.
Marketing surrounds children.
They absorb it through television, billboards, the Internet and corporate-sponsored products in schools. In recent years, marketers have refined their target audiences to smaller age brackets to sell more effectively. One hot demographic is the set of young people born from 1977 to 1994. They spend billions of dollars each year on themselves and influence their parents to spend billions more on products for the family. The movie was rated PG-13, flagging potentially inappropriate material for children under 13.