Tuesday, 16 January 2018

KIDS ARE NOT SOPHISTICATED (Letter to Dom Post, Jan 17)



“Naked. Hostility. Food.”

Great headline (Naked hostility towards food advertising, January 16)! In our Kiwi culture, obsessed with food and sex, these ingredients are "sure to rise" to your readers’ attention.
Glen Wiggs, who seems to be in the business of deregulating advertising, asserts in connection with TV2’s shame-making, Friday nights’ exhibition of male and female genitalia and criticism thereof, that children and teenagers are “sophisticated enough to cope with watching nudity and violence without being unduly influenced”.

Obviously in denial of the evidence of our teen pregnancy, alcoholism, drug and suicide statistics, he extrapolates that young people must therefore also be “sophisticated enough” to cope with ads for food.

Kids are kids. It's not in their nature to be sophisticated - yet. The evidence that children and teens are not able to withstand the lure of ads for food is glaringly obvious at any school assembly or swimming pool.

Wiggs hoists himself with his own petard.

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