Hey kid - you wanna buy a ...

Nag factor. Pester power. These have become familiar buzzwords in the conference rooms of America's most powerful ad agencies, according to Enola Aird, mother of two teens.

"Advertisers want kids to wear down their parents, and they devote hours to figuring this out," says Ms. Aird. "They are determined to 'own' our children from a young age, turn them into lifelong consumers, and sell to them wherever they can find them."

Aird is not merely venting. As director of the Motherhood Project in Washington, an offspring of the Institute for American Values, she knows that it's her job to speak out about the concerns of parents. The commercialization of childhood in today's media-crazed culture is now front and center among those concerns, she says.

American corporations spend $15 billion per year on advertising and marketing to children, twice what they spent 10 years ago. As the average child reportedly watches 40 hours of television per week, sees 40,000 TV commercials each year, and influences $500 billion in annual spending - on toys, fast food, electronics, and more - this investment appears to be paying off.

With spending soaring and product-hawking venues burgeoning far beyond TV, many parents, educators, and other concerned citizens are becoming fed up by what they consider a rampant assault of commercialism on children.

These individuals feel simultaneously powerless against a multibillion-dollar industry but also emboldened by new scientific research. Studies by the Kaiser Foundation and the World Health Organization both link childhood obesity to fast-food advertising. The American Psychological Association has found that children under 8 are incapable of understanding persuasive intent.

To strengthen their voices, many of these adults are becoming activists by participating in grass-roots ad-busting advocacy groups such as Aird's, so that they can be better heard on the national stage and especially by lawmakers.

In addition to the Motherhood Project, which is lobbying for congressional hearings on regulation of TV commercials, some of the most prominent groups are the Citizen's Campaign for Commercial Free Schools; the Coalition to Stop Commercial Exploitation of Children; Dads and Daughters; and perhaps the leader of the pack, the Oregon-based Commercial Alert.

With Gary Ruskin at its helm, Commercial Alert has gained recent attention on Capitol Hill for its "Parents' Bill of Rights."

The document includes nine provisions to help parents combat commercial influences, one of which calls for banning advertising aimed at children under 12 and two of which have already been introduced in the US Senate.

The first bill under consideration requires fast-food chains to disclose basic nutritional information, and the other, introduced last month by Sens. Ron Wyden (D of Oregon) and Ted Stevens (R of Alaska), would ban list brokers without parental permission from collecting data about children 16 and under - everything from ethnicity and family income to hobbies - and selling it to advertisers and marketers.

This practice extends even to the diaper set, which is especially alarming to parents. But no matter what the child's age, parents consider these lists an invasion of privacy.

"Parents are flabbergasted and angry when they learn that their child's information could be sold on the Internet," says Chris Fitzgerald, press secretary for Senator Wyden.

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