10 Propositions on kids' junk food ads

On advertising junk food to kids
Notes from a seminar at the Social Market Foundation, London, 3 November, 2003

I don’t care how bad advertising to kids is, or how egregious the product that it is pushing. I don’t care how young the children are or by what wonderful wiles the advertisers get into the little darlings' minds. So the case can be as bad as it possibly can be, and it wouldn’t trouble me in the tiniest bit.

So of course we shouldn't ban junk food advertising to children

First, all the evidence I have ever seen says that bans don’t work; where there has been a ban the bad behaviour continues.

Secondly I gather that there is a good lot of evidence that children are markedly savvy consumers of media. There’s a lot of media about, it’s their world, they enjoy it and they deal with it. In any case advertising is the world in which children have got to grow up in, in the same sense that they have to grow up in a world with hot water in kettles and roads full of killing machines. They also have to deal with the wiles of capitalists trying to get at them. These are all just givens about which they need innoculation, in the same way that we need to give kids a dose of dirt (granted that an overly clean environment has now led to childhood asthma).

Parents are of course subjected to pester power. When wasn’t that true? Parents have always had to deal with their child’s yearnings, and to say no. It’s practically their main job as a parent. Advertising merely produces the luxuriant opportunity for parents to say no to children.

Being an old fart I’m free to say that modern parents have lost their grip on their children, which is for parents to address, and for them to worry about. Of course partly why parents have lost their grip on their children is that they are too busy getting two incomes and that opens up a whole other question about why so many people wish to work so much. I don’t buy the argument that they have got to. People just want nicer cars, and two foreign holidays, and they seem to accept that they will have badly brought up children as a consequence.

If you go to the ‘darling poor’ issue (which is easy to do): we’re at tremendous risk of patronising the poor in this matter. But in any case, Marie Antoinette would have been able to put a spin on her little mantra about the poor eating cake.Surely, she might now say (I do): the poor are defended from pester power rather better than the rich because after all they’re broke. They can simply say, not only "No - I don’t want you to have it", but, "No - I can’t afford it" as well. Rich parents are always open to the accusation that if they wanted to, they could buy whatever junk the kids wanted.

Beyond all this, I have a general interest in nay-saying campaigners of every kind. Most campaigners are wasting their time, and ours. One of the things that campaigners habitually do, in the words of Anthony Daniels, is to pathologise things. So we pathologise food, we pathologise advertising, pathologise the business of being a child or being a parent.

We are - or ought to be - strong enough persons to handle these issues and to avoid having our lives pathologised. And as a subset of that, we should avoid seeking out villains. WE are the problem - our parenting, our consumption is the problem. Not the rise of capitalism. As a rightwinger, I resist the urge to push the problem out into some other area. I want to locate the problems that we have right here with us, with me. It’s almost certainly my fault in some way! Not someone in a top hat smoking a big cigar riding around in a big Rolls Royce.