Kid-oriented marketing firms and branches have sprouted like rain forest fungi as the direct buying power of the 4-to-12 set grew from $2.9 billion in 1978 to $24 billion in 1998. The same age group influences an additional $200 billion in family spending, according to Texas A&M University's James U. McNeal, the psychology-trained market researcher who is considered the godfather of marketing to kids.
Over these same two decades, surveys of high school seniors have revealed a dramatic shift toward materialistic life goals. To many signatories of the APA letter, it seemed that the ad bombing of America's youth had fed that greed, and that for all their purchases, greed wasn't fulfilling the children -- human fulfillment, after all, being the objective of the psychological profession.
"Since 1979 I've been asking kids what they want to do when they grow up, and 'Make a lot of money' is now the most common answer," says Allen D. Kanner, who has a psychotherapy practice in Berkeley, Calif. "The rich kids are depressed because they don't think they'll make as much money as their parents. The middle-class kids all want all these things. Even the very poor kids are obsessed with what's cool to buy."
For these concerned psychologists, the giddiness of Internet-driven prosperity masks familial anxiety. Parents are always working and kids seem to grow up so quickly, each generation's maturity accelerating faster, like gigabytes on a Pentium chip -- kids becoming 'tweens and 'tweens just teens without beards.
Advertisers have seemed eager to feed the communication gap fostered by the information revolution, splitting generations into X, Y and NeXt. "Today's children are like a new species," says Mark Smycka, a Toronto market researcher who organizes an annual award ceremony, the Golden Marbles, for the best ads aimed at kids.
No one observes this alienation quite as acutely -- and in quite as ambiguous a moral light -- as the psychologists who work in and around the advertising world.
In 1997, a group of University of Wisconsin researchers wrote in the Journal of Consumer Research that teenagers raised in disrupted families -- roughly half of all kids in America -- "exhibit higher levels of compulsive consumption than those reared in intact families.
"Elevated material values and compulsive buying serve an instrumental role," they reported with a curious neutrality, "in helping these young adults cope with the stresses and uncertainty associated with family disruption."
But if they accept that compulsive materialism is a simple given of American society, professionals working for Madison Avenue firms still draw vaguely defined limits on the methods used to fan those compulsions. At the very least, they agree, commercials shouldn't encourage children to smoke or drink or have sex.
"Children are consumers in training. Anybody can fool them, deceive them or cheat them," McNeal wrote in a 1991 issue of the Journal of Business Strategy. "It takes a mighty good marketer to satisfy children's wants and needs and not do anything unethical, intentionally or unintentionally."
Whiton Paine, a developmental psychologist and co-founder of Kid2Kid, a Philadelphia market research firm, last year developed an ethics audit to help companies avoid sending messages that "either delay or unduly accelerate a child's development." Stimulating desires for drugs, tobacco, sex and booze are taboo in Paine's code -- duh -- as are messages that promote "addiction" to products. While Paine won't discuss the specifics, he says he also has discouraged clients from using particular ads that depict angry relations between teenagers and their parents or overly coifed preteens, even though such ads, in roiling the emotions of their audience, may lead to greater awareness of a product.
On the other hand, the more innocent the product, the more acceptable it is to wallpaper a kid's brain with innumerable iterations of it, in the view of some of these professionals.
Pokémon is a prime example of licensing gone mad. The Pokémon story's "lack of dark-side behavior and emotions," says psychologist Dan Acuff of Youth Marketing Systems Consulting, in Glendale, Calif., "allows for penetration into the lucrative preschool and early school-age markets."
Paine gives Pokémon mixed reviews: good for promoting honorable Japanese values, bad for the creation of artificial shortages, which has led to schoolyard fights.
Next page: There are no protected zones