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I recently read an article in Best Life magazine that discussed the pervasiveness of marketing to children. Boy was it scary! The article stated that toddlers as young as 2 years old will ask for a particular brand of food or toy based on the advertisements they see while watching cartoons. Think about that. We’re teaching our children consumerism before they are even out of diapers! It’s no wonder that our society is so consumer-centric. We are bombarded with branding before we can say the alphabet. In the past 25 years, marketing to children has grown from $100 million a year in holiday ads to $17 billion in a year round quest to fill our children’s minds with licensed characters and branding.

As a kid, I was a big Star Wars fan (ok, I still am). This was one of the first large-scale attempts to combine on-screen entertainment with merchandising. I spent countless hours recreating scenes from the movies with my action figures… thank goodness George Lucas didn’t have access to computer animation in 1977.

Now the whole idea of branding has gone to the extreme. It no longer consists of just movies and action figures, but now includes clothing, toothbrushes, Band-Aids, web sites, DVDs, furniture, video games, Happy Meals, etc. Kids can even go on ToucanSam.com where they can play games and watch cartoon clips while being immersed in the sugar-laden branding of Fruit Loops. Think about that dangerous loop. Kids see an ad on TV, go online and play games, and see more ads online, some of which direct them back to television. This is a complete immersion in marketing and consumerism.

Think about the implications this has on our kids. Just the other night, my three year old daughter got upset because we left her Dora the Explorer toothpaste at Grandma’s house. She was forced to use her Thomas the Train toothpaste, which apparently is all of the sudden inferior. This seems harmless enough now, but she is only three! Fifteen years from now, she may be throwing a tantrum because she had to settle for a Chevy when she had her marketing induced mind set on a BMW. Who am I kidding? Chevy won’t be around in 15 years, but that’s a different story. And if you think you can avoid this trouble by limiting non-branded items, think again. Just try to make a trip to Wal-Mart or Target to buy household items for your kids without licensed images pasted all over them and you will quickly find that your options are limited.

When I was a kid, I wanted a Millennium Falcon because it was in the movie and Han Solo was pretty cool. Now, kids want I-Phones without even understanding what an I-Phone is. Does a ten year old really need to have streaming stock quotes? Of course not; they just want something cool that other kids will envy.

Now I hope that if your 10 year-old asks for an I-Phone, you shoot that request down promptly. But think about the example you set. Did you really need that 128,000 Btu grill with booster rockets and GPS or would something a little more reasonable suffice?