Parental Influence and Children's Responses to Television Advertising

Parental influence on third and fourth graders' cognitive, attitudinal, and behavioral responses to TV advertising was explored in structured personal interviews with 222 children and their parents. The dimensions of parental influence addressed were frequency of parent-child interactions about advertising and commercials, and parental control of the child's television viewing habits. Interviews were conducted with children and their parents simultaneously at different locations in the respondents' homes. Frequent parent-child interaction was found to correlate with greater parent-child attitude difference and frequent purchase requests. Support was found for hypothesized relationships between the level of control effort reported by parents and the child's (1) understanding of the nature and purpose of and (2) attitude toward television advertising.