eMedicineLive

Attracted by their favorite cartoon characters and logos on different food products, children today are increasingly pestering their parents to buy these products. Researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health conducted a study to specifically study this “nag factor” in children as a result of the effect of print and other multimedia. They tried to explore the effect of these advertisements on the children and the strategies that parents adopt to cope with the resultant nagging by the children.

 

The study has been published in the August 2011 issue of the Journal of Children and Media. The researchers realized that marketers are increasingly using cartoon characters and famous logos to capture the young minds and sell their junk food and beverages which are low in nutritional value. According to Dina Borzekowski, EdD, EdM, MA, senior author of the study and an associate professor with the Bloomberg School’s Department of Health, Behavior and Society, mothers participating in the study found  that packaging, characters, and commercials as the three main reasons behind the nagging by the children.

 

The participants in the study included 64 mothers of children ages 3 to 5 years who were interviewed between October 2006 and July 2007. They were asked questions about the household environment, themselves, their child’s demographics, media use, eating and shopping patterns, and requests for advertised items. They were also asked about the methods they adopt to counter this nagging. The researchers chose mothers for questioning as it is usually the mothers who take care of the nutritional needs of the family members.

 

Borzekowski and colleagues found that nagging is usually of three types: juvenile nagging, nagging to test boundaries, and manipulative nagging. They also found that manipulative nagging and overall nagging increased with age. While 36% of the mothers found limiting commercial exposure as an effective strategy to prevent the nag factor; 35% of them found it better to explain to the kid, the reason for not buying a particular food or beverage. Giving in to the child’s demands was not found to be effective by most of the mothers. The researchers reached to the conclusion that to counter the increasing incidence of obesity in children, policies have to be directed to curtail the amount of food and beverage advertising in print and multimedia.

 

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