Have you noticed the recent trend in advertising?  The advertisers have found a new way to capitalize on the American families desire to make their children happy.  It used to be that the advertisers would be subtle in their manipulation.  They would show a product and some happy children using it, and then leave it up to the children to go and whine to their parents about wanting it.  

After that they moved to children telling each other how wonderful the product was.  Through the use of peer pressure the children let each other know how incomplete their lives were without the product.  The result would be an unhappy youngster whose parents would wonder if they were entering a depression. This depression however would magically dissipate once the product was obtained. Now the advertisers have decided they no longer needed to manipulate or coerce children to ask for products.  They have a new tactic. 

Todays commercials show children now as articulate, worldly, and very materialistic.  They know the product and they know the how when and where of acquiring it.  And most importantly they know that they still need to get their parents to buy it for them.  Now they are being taught that all they have to do is threaten or demand it from their parents.  The advertisers are helping educate our young people that parental guilt is so strong that parents are likely to knuckle under to demands and threats.  No more pouty sad faces. 

In one commercial you have a parent spending his weekend building a tree house for his sons.  With great delight he tells his sons of its completion only to have them reject it because they prefer the comforts of his minivan, which has air conditioning and other amenities that the tree house doesn’t have. Next we see a daughter telling her dad that the appliances in the home are inadequate.  As she points out the need for new appliances, he gives her opinion serious consideration.  Apparently her opinion is very valuable, maybe more than that of the mother’s.  Because we later see that the child was paid by the mother to tell the Dad of the need for new appliances.   I guess Mom and Dad’s communication is so poor that the daughter had greater influence. 

The one commercial that, for me, is really disturbing is the one where the kids want the parents to get a digital package.  They tell the parents how financially reasonable the package is and other benefits of getting it.  However, just in case the parents don’t take them seriously they end by saying.  “..til you call ------- I’ll be at the Wilson’s. "

 When my husband and I saw this we both laughed and said “is that a threat or a promise.”  You see, for my money, if those ungrateful kids were mine I would just let them go to the Wilson’s.  I say let the Wilson’s clothe, feed, and pay for the little buggers.  My guess is that the Wilson’s would be begging to send the kids home before too long. 

Proverbs 22:6 -  Train a child in the way he should go and when he is old he will not turn from it.

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