Kids may think it's just nagging, but parents are really doing it, as they say, "for your own good ... for your own benefit."

Parents, in their roles as providers and nurturers, try to instill useful habits and appropriate benefit-seeking behaviors early in life.But, these instructions are not always easy for kids to learn, or for parents to teach.

Some people -- big and little -- do better than others. Often, when the the kid's question,"Why?" isn't satisfied by a "For Your Own Good" answer, the conversation ends with an abrupt parental "because I said so!" See if these phrases are familiar:

Protection: If we have a "good," we want to keep it.

Parents try to teach kids some basics to protect, to maintain, to take care of the "goods" they have -- such as their health ("Brush your teeth," "Put on a raincoat"), their appearance ("Comb your hair" ), their possessions ("Pick up your toys," "Lock your bicycle") their space ("Clean your room," "Make your bed"), their social behaviors ("Don't hit your little friends").

Relief: If we have a "bad," we want to get rid of it.

Parents try to teach kids some basics to get rid of the "bad" relating to their health ("Take your cough medicine"), their appearance ( "Put on some clean pants"), their possessions ('Throw that away. It's no good for you."), their social behaviors ("Don't pick your nose!").

Prevention: If we don't have a "bad," we want to avoid it.

Parents try to teach kids some basics to avoid dangers, to prevent harms, problems, relating to their health and safety ("Watch out. Look both ways"), their appearance ( "Tie your shoes before you trip"), their possessions ("Careful, that breaks easily"), their social behaviors ("Don't talk to strangers" "Stay away from him. He's bad company"). Such warnings, precautions. and guidelines are crucial to safeguard children in a world with real dangers, both physical and psychological. Sometimes, parents even use threats and punishments "for your own good." Yet, despite realities and the parents' good intentions, it still is a drag for most kids to "be yelled at," to hear such negatives.

Acquisition: If we don't have a "good," we want to get it.

Parents try to teach kids some basics to get the right kind of goods, to seek the right kind of benefits for their health ("Eat your vegetables"), their appearance ("You look so nice in that"), their possessions ("That's really your style"), their social behaviors ("You're so considerate of others"). Such praise and encouragement is positive reinforcement for doing good things, often used with promises and rewards.

Protection, prevention, and relief ads are primarily directed at adults, as the caretakers.

Most ads targeted at kids are acquisition ads.

Here's where the conflicts usually occur because advertisers are often saying one thing, the parents are saying the opposite. Thus, the parents are cast in the negative role as the nay-sayers, the spoil-sports, the wet-blankets, prudes, the bad guys, whatever the current phrasing.

Kids get their money from gifts (birthdays, holidays), allowances, outside work (babysitting), part-time jobs, student loans. Often, parents are caught between the rising costs of necessities (food, clothing, housing, electricity, gas, water, cable and phone bills; car payments, insurance, repairs, gas; medical care, school costs, credit card debts, and taxes) and the increasing desires stimulated by ads specifically targeted at kids.

Most kids spend their money on non-essentials: on entertainments (movies, videogames, ipods, downloads, music CDs, DVDs, concerts, toys, games, electronics, collectible cards); foods (snacks, candy, colas, pizza, burgers); fads and fashion cosmetics and clothes.

Advertisers also know kids not only have their own spending money, but also exert great influence on their parents' money (asking, begging, pestering) to buy something for them, and in selecting other household products.

Fundamental Difference

Although mutual benefits (for parent, child, advertiser) may sometimes be possible, a fundamental difference exists in the role of adults and children. Parents (and teachers, nurses, doctors, and others, acting -- in loco parentis -- in place of the parents) see the children as individuals to be protected and nurtured.

Advertisers, in contrast, see the children as customers -- as an audience to be lured, as a market to buy their products. Market Research done by advertisers is not done to improve the lives of children, but to improve the sales of products.

Wide and Narrow Contexts

The parental role sees the child as a whole person in a wider context -- including future benefits and harms -- not just as a customer in an immediate, specific sales transaction. For example, advertisers will always defend their own single sales transaction ("One hamburger... one box of cereal... one soda... is not going to hurt anyone!) as being perfectly legal and not harmful. Such limited claims are obviously true.

Although a few disclosure laws relating to some health and safety problems require some qualifications in the small print ("...as part of a complete breakfast"), generally speaking, advertisers omit disadvantages and are not required to reveal other options, other choices, long term disadvantages, and contextual problems (such as personal affordability, limitations, and family stress).

Critics of advertising are basically concerned with the wider context of these harmful consequences, these unwanted, unseen and unintended "side-effects." Some critics deal with the indirect and less obvious harms to the individual: such as personal problems and psychological harms (frustration, envy, discontent), family stress, debt cycle). Other critics stress the harmful social consequences can come from seemingly "invisible" causes, which are unseen, less obvious, less visible because they are gradual, cumulative, slowly developing over the long term-- such as: Environmental Problems (consumption, waste, destruction of natural resources, pollution); Social Justice (issues about affluence and poverty; "Haves" and "Have-Nots"); and the negative effects of Materialism (both from a religious and secular view).

Thus, while a trained, well-funded advertiser can focus single-mindedly on one thing, selling the benefit of their specific product to a kid, the parental role is much broader, of considering the wider context, now and later -- not only of this one product, but also of the hundreds of other advertising campaigns constantly targeting kids.

"Instant gratification" is the most commonly recognized difference between parental concerns and advertising appeals. Most ads aimed at kids emphasize getting benefits, here and now!

From fact and fiction, from Neverland Ranch and Pinocchio's Pleasure Island, we know that kids -- without restraint -- would probably gorge themselves on sweets and treats. Delayed gratification and postponed pleasures seldom appeal to the young. With ads urging instant gratification, and parents warning about future problems, kids are in the middle. Parents often find themselves cast in negative roles -- as the spoil-sports, nay-sayers, prudes, nags.

(In the wider public debate, advertisers often attack consumerists, educators, and health-care advocates as being overprotective, fuss-budgets, "so-called do-gooders" and "national nannies.")

Teaching kids about long-term benefits, delayed gratification, payoffs in the future -- achieved only after hard work and effort -- is not a quick and easy task, especially in our advertising saturated environment. But, it is the goal of the good parent -- and the good teacher and the good coach -- who can give each other mutual support by emphasizing that gaining any skills -- intellectual (reading, writing, mathematical, music, computer) and physical (sports, exercise, fitness) -- is a long term process.

Ads are designed to offer kids benefits they want, right now (popularity, excitement, fun, esteem, sex appeal) by becoming like the people who appear in ads and use the products (nice clothes, good times, entertainments, sweets and treats).

Ads don't scold. Unlike parents and teachers who often require hard work, obedience, rules, and discipline ("for your own good"), ads tell kids what they want to hear. Ads flatter us, praise our good taste, and are "on our side."

Consider the gross inequality, for example, in the United States which permits (at present) TV ads to be directed at very young children: the pre-school children watching the ads are hardly the equal of the sophisticated adult team, the professional persuaders, which plan them.

In the past, I have written that certain advertisers were "child molesters." Indeed, this is an attention-getting charge, but it is accurate. In Language and Public Policy (NCTE, 1974 p. 228), I presented this analogy:

"Our moral sense is outraged by inequality. In sexual matters we already have a sophisticated vocabulary to describe situations of equality and inequality. For example, we speak of seduction when there is not an equality, a mutuality of exchange, when the knowledgeable or crafty seducer takes advantage of the innocent or naive; we speak of rape when force or violence creates a situation of inequality; we speak of child molesting when age is concerned, when the young are abused. Using this analogy, it is clear that in language situations today many of our advertisers are seducers and child molesters, taking advantage of the young, the innocent, the naive, the gullible."

We need laws against "statutory deception." This sexual analogy focuses on the main issue: inequality. An analogy moves from the known to the unknown, from the familiar to the unfamiliar. We know and are familiar with those laws relating to sexuality. We can see the patterns of distinction being made there; the principles of equality and mutuality -- "consenting adults;" in the case of statutory rape, "informed consent."

Laws against rape and statutory rape are not blanket prohibitions against human sexual activity. Laws against deception or such "statutory deception" are not blanket condemnations of advertising. These parallels with statutory rape need to be extended because our laws have already established doctrines of "special protection" of children. Children may willingly do things, if enticed or lured by adults; yet the law gives "special protection" based on the premise that they lack the knowledge and experience to know the potential consequences of their acts.

"Deceit and violence," as Professor Sissela Bok of Harvard put it, in her book, Lying, "are the two forms of deliberate assault on human beings. Both can coerce people into acting against their will. Most harm that can befall victims through violence can come to them also through deceit. But deceit controls more subtly, for it works on belief as well as action."

Alas, 1976 was the highwater mark of consumerist attempts to get more FTC control over the content and advertising on childrens shows on commercial television. Since the Reagan administration in 1980, corporate and media influence on Congress and the agencies is so powerful that only minor reforms have been made since then. Most young people in America today have grown up in a commercial culture which has more concern for its corporations than its children. (See: "The KidVid Controversy" )

Most parents wouldn't tolerate strangers approaching their kids in person, either at their door or at the mall, and trying to sell them something. Yet, in most homes, TV is the babysitter and parents allow some very sophisticated strangers to sell things to their kids.

Most parents -- like most kids -- have had no training in persuasion analysis and regard ads, like pesky mosquitos, as annoying but insignificant. In fact, 75-80% of adults respond to annual survey questions, answering "Advertising doesn't affect me."

How did advertisers get so entrenched within the home and in the schools?

Cartoons were first. In the generation prior to television, animated cartoons started in the early days of the movies. Each full length feature film would be preceded by short films, a Newsreel, and a cartoon (Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny, and the like). In this original context, cartoons were free from commercialism, and made up a very small portion of the on-scene entertainment. Cartoons were not the main purpose of going to the movies, but a little extra bonus, freely given, without any strings attached.

Thus, when TV in the 1950s started using cartoon programs for kids, and parents started using the TV as a "free baby-sitter," parents didn't think in terms of their kids being used as a target audience for advertisers. After all, kids had no money. What could they buy!

But, advertisers soon found out that kids had "pester power" and would act as an "in-house" sales staff, begging and whining, until their parents bought them the toy or the breakfast cereal they saw on TV. Saturday mornings -- the kids shows --became the chief moneymaker for all of the commercial networks because cartoons were cheap (and could be recycled often) and advertisers were plentiful.

PBS to the Rescue!

In the next generation, when commercial television became saturated with ads targeted at kids, the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) came to the rescue by offering commercial-free entertainment and good educational programs (Sesame Street, etc.) as a "safe place" during the day where parents could feel comfortable if the TV were set at the PBS channel. Or, if their kids were off to school.

Times Change.

Now PBS has "proud sponsors" and schools have "educational partners" such as Channel One.

With over 12,000 schools (with over 8 million students) currently using -- or being used by -- Channel One, some teachers may think it's "OK," because it's still legal. Or because "everyone's doing it." But, that doesn't make it ethical.

How did this commercialism infiltrate into the schools and the living rooms? In a word: money.

Money under a protective cover of words: virtuous words,, lip service, and flattery.

Once kids are in front of the TV sets, then it's the job of Channel One to keep the kids watching (and the teachers happy) with 10 minutes of news and lively "infotainment" features. They do their job well. So also do the advertisers. Scolding teachers will not be needed to keep the kids watching these delightful programs and attractive ads. Any classroom teacher with a follow-up commentary about potential health problems (obesity, sugared drinks, caffeine-cola addiction) or emotional problems (engendered by advertising image manipulation) is apt to be seen as the heavy, an old fuddy duddy, or whatever the current term.

However, the appropriate role of parents, teachers, and schools is often precautionary - to warn in advance, to point out the problems, the dangers and disadvantages which are downplayed by persuaders. Such instruction is difficult in any situation, but even more so when the distinction is blurred between the school and the marketplace.

Parents and teachers are apt to give warnings, to point out errors and faults. They often scold or correct ("constructive criticism"-- "for your own benefit" ) to help and to protect.

In contrast, advertisers flatter us and make us feel good about ourselves, our desires and choices. No wonder kids like ads. Advertisers never criticize. They flatter and praise their audience, saying that they're "on our side."