Got a child? Then you've almost certainly got a traitor in your shopping trolley, a nutritional fifth columnist out to scupper all your dietary intentions through a chilling nagging campaign. A team of researchers from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg school of public health has recently turned its attention to the phenomenon of the supermarket tantrum – a phenomenon so soul-piercing that, even if you have cannily avoided taking responsibility for a junior member of our species, you'll still no doubt have been touched by it at some point.
The terrible howl of denial as a child is separated from a longed-for box of cartoon-character-endorsed cereal is a noise that could bring the mightiest retail warrior to his or her trembling knees, begging for respite, pleading with the parent in charge to just let the child have the junk and make the shouting stop. Parents themselves have to somehow negotiate a combination of their children's fury at being deprived, strangers' horror at the public scene of ill-discipline, and their own aspirations to meet government-sanctioned health targets. No wonder that the last of those often gets squeezed out in the heat of the aisle, allowing pester-power to exact a triumph for chocolate biscuits over five-a-day.
It's not the children's fault, exactly. Most of the 3- to 5-year-olds in the small Johns Hopkins study had been corrupted by a food industry that knows just what to offer tiny consumers in order to recruit them as wailing, shin-kicking brand ambassadors on the inside of otherwise hostile families. It can take all of a parent's ingenuity to get though a shopping trip without unwillingly picking up a tin of Barbie spaghetti shapes, a box of cereal with Lightning McQueen smirking from the front, or a bag of fruit chews with a catchy jingle. Advertisers are fearsomely effective at finding the triggers to make children want whatever inappropriate thing is being sold.
But if kids are naive and easily swayed when it comes to their food preferences, they're dangerous sophisticates in terms of their own tactics of persuasion. The researchers divided nagging into three different kinds: "juvenile nagging, nagging to test boundaries, and manipulative nagging". Faced with a three-headed attack of nagging genres, parental resolve scatters like an ill-disciplined army.
The study identifies a whole panoply of strategies used by mothers in response (only mothers were questioned for the research), some of which frankly don't sound much like strategies at all. For example, "giving in" is cited as the "least successful strategy" – a surprise to everyone who previously thought that telling a child they can have the deep-fried potato snack was a good way of stopping them from eating the deep-fried potato snack.
Other modes of resistance include yelling and ignoring, or at the more successful end of the spectrum, limiting commercial exposure and explaining to children why a certain item isn't going to make it to the checkout. Of course, this is stultifyingly obvious in some respects: if you don't want your children to be influenced by advertising, don't let them watch hours of ads. And yet for parents to act on it, they have to accept a fairly sinister scenario as the truth: the media that offer to entertain your children with whizzy, witty cartoons and beaming presenters are acting as a willing gateway to an even more malevolent entity – a food industry that promises to nourish your children while actually setting them up for obesity and type 2 diabetes.
However much you rationally accept that TV channels and sweetie manufacturers are profit-driven entities, it's still tough to break the emotional conviction that they couldn't possibly be invested in anything that might cause harm to your child. It would be easier to believe that the clown you hired for your toddler's party was opening the fire door to a crack dealer. The researchers conclude that: "To address childhood obesity, it may be necessary to limit the amount of food and beverage advertising shown on commercial television and other media, as this may lessen children's nagging for unhealthy items."
Even that qualified recommendation implies an unreasonable faith in the willingness of broadcasters and processed food vendors to do the right thing – any attempt to limit advertising would surely be resisted from both sides with all the fury of a toddler reaching for a chocolate biscuit and being fobbed off with an oatcake. The only people who have a genuine interest in a child's dietary wellbeing are its parents. For mums and dads, the only option is to stand firm, turn off the telly, and try to persuade your issue that what they really want is a nice bit of cheddar, and not a spreadable cheese product flogged by a flirtatious cartoon farm animal.
