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Do you know how many advertising images our children are bombarded with every day?

Drum roll please, and I’m not making this up: somewhere between 6,000 and 7,000. That’s according to findings from the folks at the Center for Parent/Youth Understanding (CPYU.org) in Elizabethtown, Pa.

Six to seven thousand? That’s a little tough to imagine, but it gets easier when one thinks of the fleeting images our kids get on everything from bill boards to back packs to lunch boxes and milk cartons, store windows and stores.

And that’s all before they get to magazines, television, the Internet and radio.

As bad as all the pitches are for the children’s products (I have literally forbidden my children to ask me for anything they see advertised on television, which means they pretty much can’t ask me for anything), it’s the ads of a more mature nature, which they may come across anywhere, unfortunately, that have me the most concerned.

At the same time, I want my kids to be able to engage the culture and think about it wisely, not to be afraid of it or hide from it.

Enter CPYU. Though they look at the culture from a distinctly Christian perspective, their Web site would be helpful to any parent who cares about understanding and engaging in the world of their children.

Of course, we do at times have to limit as best we can what our kids get from the culture, i.e., I’m glad to have good Internet filtering software.

But I also want to give my kids the tools they need to wisely navigate their culture.

And so CPYU has lots of ways for us parents to engage with our kids on their own playing field. And in a way that’s positive. (I fully confess — I hadn’t heard of “Pink” before seeing the CPYU Web site.)

Anyway, my favorite part of the Web site? All about advertising.

CPYU goes through many of advertising images our kids are seeing and gives us parents suggestions for how to talk about these things with our kids. One recent ad for Reese’s cups says, “Sharing is a nice gesture. Stupid, but nice.”

Wow, talk about a message contrary to that which any decent parent is trying to teach his kids.

Another, in Entertainment Weekly, for Miller’s Chill beer, is promoting something I didn’t know existed: fruit-flavored beers. (Gee, I wonder who is most likely to be attracted to that!)

Another advertisement has a man and woman’s hands with a bottle of Vodka pressing the “stop” button in an elevator, and it’s obviously sexually suggestive. Still another image says, “Music represents life, everything you do and everything you are about.”

I love Reese’s cups and music. Vodka is out and fruit-flavored beer sounds a little odd, especially compared to a nice cabernet, but you get the point. And sexual seduction within marriage is a gift.

So it’s not necessarily that the products are unwholesome, or even that the messages are always “wrong.”

But it’s a chance to talk to our kids about how the advertising industry seeks us out, plays on emotions and even our wholesome desires (sex, food, etc.) in cheapened ways that cannot be as satisfying as enjoying those things in the right context.

We might even use the ad about music, for instance, to talk about differences in musical taste, what our kids are drawn to in music, how to distinguish beautiful music (say, a Rod Stewart ballad, of course) from something not as satisfying to the soul.

The point is to help our kids to wisely navigate and engage their culture, not to hide from it. So, I guess if I could help them think through one ad a day, then they just have to be on their own for the other 6,999.

— Scripps Howard News Service