parents' views of the benefits claimed in educational toy advertising
The multibillion-dollar educational toy industry is fueled, in part, by parents who feel pressured to promote their children's learning beginning in the first three years of life. Parents buy educational and electronic learning toys even in the absence of evidence of their efficacy. In this study, parents were administered a survey designed to probe parental perceptions of the developmental claims on toy packaging as well as toy purchasing patterns. We found that parents intuitively assign claims to major developmental domains and that parents themselves formed distinct clusters with regard to the level of influence they reported for these categories of claims. That ambivalent parents consistently purchased the most toys suggests that media and societal influences may be a persuasive factor in parental thinking and toy purchasing especially for receptive parents. One implication of this research is that children's play and learning environments and their exposure to device interfaces is proximally mediated by parental factors.
advertising parental perceptions toy packaging purchasing influence sensory cognitive development