Children, Adolescents, and the Media Quotes

“Our kids didn’t do this to themselves. They don’t decide the sugar content in soda or the advertising content of a television show. Kids don’t choose what’s served to them for lunch at school, and shouldn’t be deciding what’s served to them for dinner at home. And they don’t decide whether there’s time in the day or room in the budget to learn about healthy eating or to spend time playing outside. —Michelle Obama”
― Victor C. Strasburger, Children, Adolescents, and the Media

“The idea that being drunk is funny is a myth that needs to be seriously reexamined by the entertainment industry and could easily be contributing to the high rates of binge drinking among teens”
― Victor C. Strasburger, Children, Adolescents, and the Media

“In the past three decades, when “Just say no” has become the watchword for many parents, school-based drug prevention programs, and federal drug prevention efforts, unprecedented amounts of money are being spent to induce children and adolescents to “just say yes” to tobacco and alcohol.”
― Victor C. Strasburger, Children, Adolescents, and the Media

“In the first 10 months of 2004 alone, drug companies spent nearly half a billion dollars advertising Viagra, Levitra, and Cialis (Snowbeck, 2005) (see Figure 6.27). Yet the advertising of condoms, birth control pills, and emergency contraception is haphazard and rare and remains controversial”
― Victor C. Strasburger, Children, Adolescents, and the Media

“Drug companies now spend more than twice as much money on marketing and promotion as they do on research and development, and studies show that these marketing efforts pay off (Rosenthal et al., 2002); a survey of physicians found that 92% of patients had requested an advertised drug (Thomaselli, 2003).”
― Victor C. Strasburger, Children, Adolescents, and the Media

“In November 2003, the tobacco industry did agree to cease advertising in school library editions of four magazines with a large youth readership (Time, People, Sports Illustrated, and Newsweek) (“Tobacco Ads,” 2005)”, but the industry continued for a while to target youth with ads in adult magazines with a high youth readership (Alpert, Koh, & Connolly, 2008).”
― Victor C. Strasburger, Children, Adolescents, and the Media

“Teens are exposed to 48% more beer advertising, 20% more advertising for hard liquor, and 92% more ads for sweet alcoholic drinks in magazines than are adults of legal drinking age”
― Victor C. Strasburger, Children, Adolescents, and the Media

“The first eight years of the new millennium were devoted to abstinence-only sex education, which has been shown to be ineffective (Kirby & Laris, 2009; Santelli et al., 2006), except with 12-year-old African American boys in inner-city Philadelphia (Jemmott, Jemmott, & Fong, 2010). Comprehensive sex education does work (Cavazos-Rehg et al., 2012; Kirby & Laris, 2009; Lindberg & Maddow-Zimet, 2012), but it arguably has been marginalized (Lindberg, Santelli, & Singh, 2006).”
― Victor C. Strasburger, Children, Adolescents, and the Media

“Although other countries may show more nudity, only American media titillate their viewers with countless jokes and innuendoes about all aspects of human sexuality. Yet ironically, while advertisers are using sex to sell virtually everything from hotel rooms to shampoo to drugs for erectile dysfunction, the national networks remain reluctant to air advertisements for birth control products.”
― Victor C. Strasburger, Children, Adolescents, and the Media

“Children are not born using media. Indeed, as much as children are socialized by media, they are socialized to use media in particular ways. Social psychologist Gavriel Salomon systematically explored how children’s preconceptions about a medium—for example, that print is “hard” and television is “easy”—shape the amount of mental effort they will invest in processing the medium.”
― Victor C. Strasburger, Children, Adolescents, and the Media