How to Hype-proof Your Tween: Marketers want to sell stuff (lots of stuff) to your kid. Here's how to short-circuit their 'spend more' messages.

      This article serves somewhat to balance out or respond to the article I last listed titled “Targeting the Tween.”  as the title to this article makes clear, strategies are offered to parent and teachers to help combat the onslaught of advertising directed at tweens.  The massive amount of money spent on tween products is too tempting to be ignored by marketers.  According to this article, there are 20 million tweens in the United States who spend approximately $50 billion a year of their own money!  Parents and other spend an additional $170 billion! Legislation was passed to limit advertising to children on television, however websites on the internet, magazine ads and apps for iPhones bombard tweens with advertising. Not surprisingly peer pressure plays into a tweens desire to spend on specific “must have” products. 

So parents are given tools to attempt to temper the urge for tweens (and their parents) to buy. Parents are reminded that they are not “bad parents” if they don’t purchase everything a tween wants.  The author states that establishing rules and setting limits on spending actually helps kid to feel secure. “Kids respond well to boundary-setting, it increases creativity and confidence.”  Parents and teachers are urged to help tweens develop critical thinking skills to be able to analyze marketing information. Open conversations with tweens about advertisements is very powerful.  Describing the fact that “Miley” was given those sneakers by the company or paid to wear them begins the process of analysis. The article provides a great website called Don’ Buy It, Get Media Smart where kids can play interactive games to discover the tricks of advertising, how to buy smart and free stuff. The link is: http://pbskids.org/dontbuyit/  The author acknowledges the difficulty in avoiding all advertising and that sometimes kids need to have those special clothes to help them fit in, but setting limits, procrastinating on purchases, and limiting temptations help parents to strike a balance in spending for tweens. This article offers practical advice to arm parents in the “commercial wars” of the tween years, is well-written and supports ideas and strategies with studies of children’s buying behaviors.

Kluger, J. (July 2010). How to hype-proof your tween: marketers want to sell stuff (lots of    

       stuff) to your kid. Here's how to short-circuit their 'spend more' messages.  Good               

       Housekeeping, 251, 1. p.85(5). Retrieved  from Academic OneFile via Gale.