Tapping The Kiddie Market

By Laurence Zuckerman

Once upon a time there were many magazines for children, and they featured such artful writers as Rudyard Kipling and Charles Dickens. But today's children are too distracted by television to sit down and read. Right? Wrong. In the past two years alone, the number of children's publications tracked by the Educational Press Association of America has nearly doubled, from 85 to 160, bringing their total circulation to an impressive 40 million. Says Don Stoll, executive director of the EPAA: "There has been extraordinary activity in children's periodicals."

It is not difficult to figure out why. Concern over illiteracy and the decline of the nation's schools has alarmed the generation of well-educated baby boomers who are now rearing their own children. "This is the most ardent interest on the part of parents that we've seen in a very long time," says Susan P. Bloom, director of the Center for the Study of Children's Literature at Simmons College in Boston.

Few, if any, of the current crop of children's magazines feature the literary firepower of their forebears. But what they lack in name recognition they make up for in diversity. Nearly half, including Weekly Reader, Junior Scholastic and Science Weekly, are designed as teaching aids for the classroom. Outside school, magazines such as the venerable Boys' Life, Highlights for Children and the new U.S. Kids offer a combination of fiction and nonfiction stories, puzzles and contests. Then there is the fast-growing crop of special-interest magazines, including Cobblestone (history), Faces (anthropology), Odyssey (space exploration and astronomy), Cricket (fiction), Merlyn's Pen (student fiction) and television companions like Alf and Sesame Street. A subset includes junior versions of adult magazines such as Penny Power (published by Consumer Reports), National Geographic World and the newest entry, SPORTS ILLUSTRATED FOR KIDS.

While many children's publications do not accept advertising, others see strong commercial opportunity in young readers. SPORTS ILLUSTRATED publisher Donald Barr calculates that children between the ages of nine and twelve spend $5 billion annually and influence their parents' spending of $40 billion more. SI FOR KIDS, which has sold $7.5 million in advertising since its January debut, distributes 250,000 copies of each monthly issue free to 1,200 underfunded schools in the U.S. to encourage literacy.

Still, critics argue that children should not be exposed to sales pitches, especially in the classroom. "We don't want to bring up children to believe that what corporations think is right," says Peggy Charren, president of Action for Children's Television, based in Cambridge, Mass.

While all children's publishers refuse liquor and tobacco advertising, some are more discriminating than others. Children's Television Workshop, publisher of Sesame Street, 3-2-1 Contact and KidCity, will not accept ads for candy, , medications or violent games and toys. On the other hand, Alf and Mickey Mouse, which are published by New York City-based Welsh Publishing, are little more than promotions surrounded by ads for sugarcoated breakfast cereals and video games. "We're an entertainment company," explains company president Donald Welsh.

Whatever his critics may think, Welsh's publications, like all other children's magazines, have to pass a dual test to succeed. They must appeal first to kids and then to parents, grandparents and schoolteachers, who write the checks for subscriptions.

With reporting by Leslie Whitaker/New York and Don Winbush/Atlanta