Lisa Poole / AP file

Did this little one use the "nag factor" to get those Nilla wafers into her mom's cart?

You’re pushing your cart through the supermarket, your preschooler tagging along. Your kid’s been pretty cooperative until you hit the cereal aisle, and then all heck breaks loose in front of the Fruity Pebbles.  It starts out as a low whine, “Fruity Pebbles, Fruity Pebbles,” and then, when you reach for the Cheerios, erupts into a full-blown temper tantrum.

Do you:

A) High-tail it to the checkout, making a mental note never to drag your child to the store again?

B) Ignore your child’s pleas and the stares of the other shoppers and proceed calmly to the dairy section?

C) Throw a box of Fruity Pebbles--all 11 grams of sugar and 0 grams of fiber per serving—into your cart, anything to get your kid to shut up.

If you’re like the women Dina Borzekowski interviewed for a study of the “Nag Factor”, a.k.a. “Pester Power,” you’ve probably tried all three.

“So many of us have dealt with this problem firsthand,” says Borzekowski, an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and mother of three, ages 14, 10 and 6.

Borzekowski’s main area of research is how media campaigns can sell health messages to children around the world. But she’s also interested in the flip side: how being bombarded with marketing campaigns can spur kids to nag parents to buy low-nutrition foods and drinks. In one previous study, Borzekowski found that children were more likely to eat carrots and drink milk it they came in McDonald’s packaging.

For a study published in the August issue of the Journal of Children and Media, Borzekowski and her coauthors interviewed 64 mothers of children ages 3 to 5 who lived in a Maryland suburb of Washington, D.C.

The researchers asked the moms about how much time their kids spent in front of a TV or computer screen and how much they asked for grocery products aimed at children, such as cereal in boxes emblazoned with cartoon characters. The researchers also asked the moms how they dealt with their kids nagging for such products.

The more familiar children were with characters used in marketing, like Fred Flintstone on the Fruity Pebbles box, the more likely they were to pester their mothers for the products.

“The mothers described 10 different strategies to deal with their children’s behaviors, and I feel like I’ve experienced all of them,” Borzekowski says.

Among them: A) avoid taking the child to the supermarket, B) ignore the nagging and C) give in.

But there are more effective methods, the study found.

“It’s never too early to start trying to set up rules and negotiate with the kids,” Borzekowski says. “You can even start to say, ‘we’re going to go into the store, and we’re going to get one item, and you get to pick that item.’ You can explain that to a 3-year-old.”

Her study found that among 3- to 5-year-olds, nagging increased with age. Other research suggests that nagging for heavily marketed products peaks at age 10 or 11—when media use peaks-- and then decreases in the teen years, Borzekowski says.

As any mother of a teen knows, the nagging doesn’t end at that age, but the style and objects of desire change. No more tantrums in the supermarket aisle since teens are likely to be cuckoo for clothes and cars, not Cocoa Puffs. But if they manage to nag you into submission when they’re five, Borzekowski warns, they’ll be masters of the art by 15.

Rita Rubin, a contributing writer for msnbc.com and today.com, previously covered medicine for USA Today and U.S. News & World Report. She lives in suburban Washington, D.C., with her husband and two daughters.

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