The influence of advertising on children: from consciousness to education

This study aims at investigating the possibility of teaching advertising to children so as to help them to interpret it and be fully aware of its aims. In a within-subject research among seventy-two 7-to-12-year-old children of an Italian town, we demonstrated that advertising can/must be explained to children: teaching gives results, but only to 7/8-year-old children who already possess some cognitive maturity (diminished self-centredness and in fieri abstraction skills). The 14-hour educational path is constituted of: pre-test with questionnaires and focus groups; treatment with theoretical and practical lessons; Post-test with questionnaires proposing the same questions as the pre-test. The results evince primary-school children’s learning about advertising, proving the possibility for them to be educated to commercials; in particular, they can recognize the advertising objectives, accept the inconsistencies between products and what commercials actually promise, and detect the advertising stakeholders. The concepts acquisition does not vary much from younger to older children and points out some dissonant dynamics showing that children intuitively understand some concepts but rapidly change their assertions in other more acceptable less definitive statements. Future developments could lead to use this research to create learning paths about advertising, to acquaint educators with the topic’s importance and as a representation of a geo-psychosocial situation. It should yet be explored if children’s attitude change toward advertising can lead to behavioural change in a common purchase situation. This is an open study aiming to grow up “little consumers” with activated cognitive defences and more intellectual freedom.