Television advertising directed towards young children (aged two to five) should not be allowed.

Television advertising directed towards young children (aged two to five) should not be allowed.

Watching TV is one of the favorite activities for most children, they love watching cartoons and those funny characters. Seeing this as a huge profit opportunity, many companies begin promoting their products by making advertisements directly towards young children. I don’t agree with this idea.

First of all, advertisements are usually misleading to adults, not to mention the kids who can’t distinguish bad from the good. Because children aged two to five often love imitating, they will act like someone in advertisements. Therefore, if the advertisements showed them some dangerous, violent, or impolite behaviors, they might also do that, which would harm the children. For example, when a dog is yelling at others on TV, the children would mimic the dog and yelling at their family members. In this way, they might have easily caught some bad habits without parents’ notice.

Secondly, such kind of advertisements would add financial burden to parents. Kids don’t have purchasing power, their parents buy everything for them. As a result, when they see an attractive advertisement, they might ask their parents to buy it. For instance, my little brother used to love a toy train called Thomas, every time he saw the toys’ advertisement on TV, he would ask his parents to buy it. Although he already had a bunch of toys, he still wanted more. In the end, my uncle had to spend more money on the toys to please his son.

Lastly, advertising directed to young children is tricky and could be considered as a lie to children. As is known to all, advertising is a strategy of marketing to earn profits. However, a young child who watches these advertisements doesn’t know that it aims for money, he/she might just think it is fun and want to own the product. From the perspective of morality, I don’t approve of this action.

In all, I think we shouldn’t allow television advertising directed towards young children. It not only would mislead the children into developing bad habits, harm the wallet of parents, but also would confuse children by lying to them.