Bottom line is that I think it makes the most sense to follow Trent’s example and be someone to your kids that they can look up to while minimizing their exposure to ads. I’m also planning on trying to instill in my kids a healthy skepticism of anything told to them by someone they don’t know. And an even higher degree of skepticism of those who want to sell them something.

I’m hoping they will learn the skills needed to be critical of advertising as they get older.

One of the most useful things I learned in high school in this regard was in a civics class. I honestly hated that class, but it did have a section covering a number of base techniques used to advertise. Things like the bandwagon approach (hey everybody else has it) or the emotion approach (this things will make you happy… so you don’t really need to know details about it.)

These TV shows and commercials are both appropriate accurate.

It bothers me that despite our efforts to opt out (we live in a city neighborhood virtually without chain stores, don’t have a television, buy foods in bulk and direct from the farm to avoid packaging appeals, almost never drive so there’s virtually no billboard exposure, minimize shopping, spend afternoons and weekends walking through parks, etc.) that at two years old our son is nonetheless fairly engaged with consumer culture. He has never watched television, set foot in a McDonald’s, or read any advertising outside of a few seed catalogs and posters at bus shelters, but it is not enough.

We’re going through TV detox at my house. The crappy weather has caused us to go a little loco, and I’ll admit we’re relying on it more to entertain. Before I get the “you’re terrible parent” comments, let me say that we are a VERY active household…we are generally on the go too much to watch. I just realized today, though, that the last week or so the TV has been on too much, particularly in the morning. The noise gets annoying. So this weekend: DETOX! :)

Like Trent advised, though, as they get older we’ll gradually involve them more and more in what we buy, we’ll let them be more exposed to advertising, and we’ll teach them how to see thru the ads.

There ARE other options. We have a DVD player/projector. So we watch whatever we want, so long as it comes free from the library, and never put up with a commercial. I realize that a good chunk of DVD’s for children are just one marketing wing of a vast army of consumerist crap wearing the Thomas the Tank uniforms, or the Cars uniforms, or the Ice Age uniforms. Still, eliminating the babysitting of the mind that endless TV provides can only benefit children. Even if the DVD’s vetted by parents come with a free dose of addictive marketing, those ads are easier to skip and combat than the ones on TV. Parents can also search out programming for children that DOESN’T include targeted marketing.