The communicative role of TV toy advertising in fostering children’s happiness through play interaction

This chapter will expose a research perspective that relates children’s happiness with their communicative attitude in play contexts. Play is understood and researched upon as the ultimate activity as far as children’s happiness is concerned. It is associated with expressions and environments that imply a connection with happiness as a theoretical concept and object of research. The conceptualization of happiness as a paradox has been widely discussed in adult literature and evidence. Happiness is frequently understood as linked to two main ideas and these apply preferably to adults: wellness, or wellbeing (eudaimonia) and pleasure (hedonism). On the one hand, adults are happy if they feel well, living up to their expectations, enjoying their incomes, and satisfying their desires. On the other hand, adults feel happy when they experience pleasure. The paradox of happiness occurs whenever it is possible to connect the economic condition and income with happy living per se. Young children’s happiness escapes the notions of happiness based on hedonism, beyond the idea of pleasure, but it also biases the eudaimonism conceptual possibility, because it lacks the awareness of fulfilment and of self-achievement and purpose. Young children’s happiness is therefore confirmed as an effect of communicative interaction: it is pursued through peer and group activities, and it relies on the capacity to manipulate ludic objects, such as toys and playful materials. This positive effect is identifiable in the act of viewing TV commercials. It results in different expressions that suggest the feeling of happiness, depending on the audience groups that are targeted by advertising techniques and products. Advertising struggles to induce consumption and to persuade buyers of all ages and about every market product. Even though we know material consumption is scarcely, if at all, related to happiness when we refer to children, the chapter refers to visual consumption of various advertising stimuli as a source of interaction. The fact that there is joy in sharing objects of play, in private and public contexts of interaction with other children as well as with adults, enhances behaviours that express the feeling of happiness. We acknowledge that young children’s happiness relies on interaction and peer play. Therefore, toys that are used during play activities are an important object both in sharing cultural values and in developing social behaviours related to play experiences. Their presence in TV advertising can also be understood as an educational and cultural endeavour that inspires and challenges children’s interaction towards happiness.