You think you’ve reached a milestone. Maybe your daughter has just celebrated her last day of school as a fifth grader. While you’re contemplating middle school and trying to enjoy your summer, marketers are investing time and money trying to figure out how to monopolize your family’s spending power.

Since the mid-2000’s there has been growth in the area of marketing to tweens. Tweens are pre-tweens in the age group from 8 to 12. If your daughter is falling into this age bracket before 2010 she is the prime target for the marketing of products that address her so-called sophisticated tastes and her interest in celebrities that are influencing her.

Is your daughter becoming influenced by celebrities, these nearly tween stars that proliferate cable and satellite television? They are influenced at least by the marketers that interrupt or tie-in products during children’s entertainment? Please note I said children, and use the term loosely since it seems we need to remember a tween is but a child and the industry leaders of children’s entertainment seem to lose that distinction somewhere in between entertaining children and making money.

Marketers know that television is the easiest and most popular way to get to your tween. They know they are smart and harder to reach initially, but once hooked they are banking on long term success.

Another thing to think about is that they know that today’s family size is smaller than it used to be. As such they count on the fact that less children per household means more money spent per child. Since marketers know they have fewer kids in this age bracket to reach then in days past, they are working overtime to reach them younger.

It is hard to tell if they are responsible for this anomaly we know of as kids seeming older at a younger age or if they are just trying to meet the needs of the market. I’m skeptical when they refer to tweens as having “pester power” to influence their parents. I’m even more skeptical when I know they use researchers and psychologists to ensure they have the ability to train children to influence us.

It may seem like a never ending battle especially since we have two to fight. Perhaps to win the battle we have to influence the tween audience more than the marketers and media makers do. The key may be in what the marketers know and really what we inherently know. The marketing book Kidfluence breaks down your daughter’s “pester power” into persistent pestering and important pestering. The important pestering works on parents and in light of that we need to respond with our own important messages.

What are the important messages? Every family is different but we should know that the media does not hold the answers to a family’s wants and needs. If you consider how different things were when you were a young daughter, compared to how your daughter is growing up today, you know we’ve lost some ground. Maybe family by family we can make it up that ground.