Fast food and young children

Do all children instinctively love fast food? Is the marketing to young children universally successful?

You would think so, superficially. Fast food restaurants choose bright, garish colours that seem to appeal to children. The adverts are often fun and fast paced, for limited attention spans. The food is sugary, fatty and laced with flavour enhancers (I once read that a particular fast food from a Big Name fast food restaurant had 22 flavour enhancers of various kinds in it. Ouch.) The food is, in short, designed to be as addictive as possible.

Yesterday, Tiarnan, 22 months, was watching TV. A Big Name fast food chain advertisement came on - promoting the usual range of palatable, but unhealthy foods.

Our toddler son waited until the ad was over then said: "Urgh!", stuck his tongue out, and said, "Not nice!".

Well, it is back to the marketing department with that one, I think. There is one toddler in the world, at least, who is unconvinced by the attempts to entice him to eat junk.

I wonder how many other toddlers out there react similarly?

(If you would like to learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, a scientific child prodigy, aged eight years and no months, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, four years and five months, and Tiarnan, twenty-two months, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html I also write of gifted education, IQ, intelligence, the Irish, the Malays, College, University, Chemistry, Science, genetics, left-handedness, precocity, child prodigy, child genius, baby genius, adult genius, savant, gifted adults and gifted children in general. Thanks.)

Tale of a Zebra Print

A month ago, Tiarnan, then nineteen months, was looking through some pictures of zoo animals. Tiarnan is rather fond of animals and nature, in general, and has been able to name zoo animals since quite young - though he had not gone to a zoo, until recently.

He got to one animal: a picture of a zebra and held it up suddenly, saying: "Zebra...Bagus!". Now, "bagus" is Malay for good, but it is also something else. It is a cultural reference. You see there is a series of tv advertisements, concerning milk, which features black and white dairy cows. At the end of each ad there is heard the cry of "Bagus!" - so as to say how good the milk is. They are quite funny advertisements and make for good tv for children.

What struck me, however, was how the language and references of a tv advertisement, had crept into the speech of Tiarnan, at such a young age. Clearly, he had linked the cows and the zebra, owing to their similar colouration - even though he knows that they are separate animals, and through this association, he had decided to use the language of the tv advertisement, too. This is proof that he remembers the context of the word he was using: he recalls where he heard it used and in what way it was used. Thus, his knowledge is not stored without reference to its surroundings - but embedded in the context in which he learnt it. This shows that his memory is rich. It should be noted that he would have known the word, "bagus" already, from general usage and observation - but here he had deliberately chosen to make a cultural reference, when referring to the zebra in the same context as the black and white dairy cow, from the tv advertisement.

This, of course, points to another issue. Young children can and do absorb the contents of TV shows and advertisements - so it is ever wise to monitor what they see. If my nineteen month old child can make cultural references after watching tv advertisements, so could others. Those little eyes see all, those little ears hear all - and those little minds remember it, too!

(If you would like to learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, a scientific child prodigy, aged seven years and ten months, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, four years and three months, and Tiarnan, twenty months, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html I also write of gifted education, IQ, intelligence, the Irish, the Malays, College, University, Chemistry, Science, genetics, left-handedness, precocity, child prodigy, child genius, baby genius, adult genius, savant, gifted adults and gifted children in general. Thanks.)