Some people think advertising aimed at children should be banned completely. Others argue that it is a normal part of a commercial society.

Children see a large number of advertisements every day on television and on the internet. Some people think this should be forbidden by law, while others say advertising is a normal part of business. In my opinion, advertising to small children should be strictly limited.

On the one hand, children cannot understand the purpose of advertising. A small child believes what he sees, and he does not know that the company wants to take money from his parents. Because of this, children ask for expensive toys and unhealthy food, and this creates arguments in the family. Advertising also teaches children that happiness comes from buying things, which is a bad lesson for the future.

On the other hand, advertising pays for many things that children enjoy. Cartoons, free games and many websites exist because companies pay for advertisements. If we ban all advertising, these programmes will disappear or parents will have to pay for them. Some people also say that it is the responsibility of the parents to explain to their children what advertising is.

In conclusion, although advertising brings money for children's programmes, I believe that advertising to young children should be banned, because they are too young to protect themselves. Parents cannot control everything their children watch on the internet.

Some argue that advertising directed at children should be prohibited outright, while others regard it as a legitimate commercial activity. I support a ban in principle, though I think the difficulty lies less in whether to have one than in what it could realistically cover.

The strongest argument for prohibition is a specific one about capacity rather than a general claim about vulnerability. Advertising to adults is defended on the basis that the audience knows it is being persuaded and can discount accordingly. Children below roughly eight cannot do this — they do not reliably recognise that an advertisement is trying to sell them something, and take its claims as straightforward information. The usual justification for permitting advertising therefore does not apply to them, which is a much narrower and more defensible position than saying children are easily influenced.

Against this, advertising revenue does fund a great deal of children's programming and free online content, and removing it would either reduce that provision or shift the cost to parents, with the poorest families affected most. There is also a serious practical objection: most commercial persuasion now reaches children through recommendation feeds, influencers and products embedded inside games, none of which is presented as advertising at all. A ban written in terms of television slots would regulate a medium that advertisers have largely left.

In conclusion, I support restricting advertising to young children, because the standard defence of advertising does not apply to an audience that cannot recognise it. To be meaningful, however, such a ban must be defined by the techniques used rather than by the channel, since the channel is where the current rules have already failed.

Almost nobody defends unrestricted advertising to small children, so the interesting disagreement is not whether limits are justified but where they fall and whether they can be made to mean anything. My position is that a ban is justified on a narrow and precise ground, and that most proposals for one fail not because they are wrong but because they regulate a medium advertisers have already abandoned.

The principled case turns on persuasive intent. Advertising to adults is permitted on the understanding that the audience knows it is being sold to and discounts the message accordingly — that awareness is the whole basis of the defence. Developmental research is consistent that children below about eight do not reliably possess it: they process an advertisement as information rather than as an attempt to influence them. If the justification for allowing advertising is the audience's ability to recognise it, then it simply does not extend to an audience that cannot. This is a far stronger argument than the familiar one about children being impressionable, because it does not require any claim about harm — only about capacity.

The objection about funding deserves more respect than it usually receives. Advertising subsidises children's programming and free applications, and withdrawing it does not make the content free; it makes it paid, which means poorer families lose access first. A measure intended to protect children would then have its sharpest effect on the children with the fewest alternatives, and that is a genuine cost rather than a debating point.

What makes the whole discussion urgent, though, is that the existing rules have been quietly bypassed. Regulation was built for identifiable slots between programmes, and commercial persuasion now arrives as a creator recommending a product, an item purchasable inside a game, or a feed ranked by what holds attention. None of it announces itself as advertising, which means a child who cannot recognise a labelled advertisement has no chance whatever with an unlabelled one. A ban framed around broadcast slots would therefore be de facto obsolete on the day it passed, while allowing everyone to believe the problem had been dealt with.

I therefore support prohibition, but defined by technique rather than by channel: no personalised targeting of children, mandatory and prominent disclosure by anyone paid to feature a product, and no purchase mechanisms inside content aimed at young children. Whether this is called a ban matters less than whether it names the practices, because a rule written around media formats will be outdated faster than it can be enforced.