The Influence of Advertising on Children: from Consciousness to Education

This study aims to investigate the possibility of explaining advertising to children and teaching it in its aims and needs so as to let children interpret it and be fully aware of it. In a within-subject research among seventy-two 2nd-grade and 5th-grade children of an Italian north-eastern town (35.000 inhabitants), we could demonstrate that advertising can/must, be explained to children: meaning by this that teaching gives results. Two points must be considered: only 7/8-year-old children are able to learn this matter, due to some cognitive maturity in terms of diminished self-centredness and in fieri abstraction skills; secondly, teachers to advertising must be singled out and prepared, which is not easy. The 14-hour educational path is constituted of a pre-test with questionnaires to children and their parents and focus groups; a treatment with theoretical and practical lessons; a posttest with questionnaires proposing the same questions as the pre-test. The results from this research evince primary-school children’s knowledge and competences about advertising and prove the possibility for children to be educated to commercials, in particular: acknowledgement of the objectives of advertising, acceptance of any inconsistency between a product and its promise, as expressed by commercials and detection of the advertising stakeholders. The concepts acquisition is less different from 2nd grades to 5th grades than could be expected and points out some “discordant dynamics” in children who intuitively understand some concepts but rapidly change their assertions in other more comfortable less definitive claims. Future developments could lead to use this research as a basis for the creation of learning paths about advertising – considering also the discordant dynamics, - to let parents and teachers aware of the importance of the theme and as a representation of a geo-psychosocial situation. What needs to be clarified yet is if children’s attitude change toward advertising can actually lead to a behavioural change in a common purchase situation. This is an open study, a starting point and a reflection cue whose aim is trying to let “little consumers” grow up and activate the cognitive defenses allowing them more intellectual autonomy and freedom.