Beneath the sound of jingling pocket money, you can almost hear advertisers plotting to separate young consumers from their disposable income.

But a stumbling block is looming on the horizon. Amid concerns in several countries about the ethics of advertising to children, Sweden - which already prohibits television advertising aimed at children under 12 - is expected to use its presidency of the European Union in 2001 to press for an extension of the ban to the EU's 15 member-states.

Other countries, too - among them, Denmark and Poland - are considering stricter controls. And the European Commission, mindful of how television crosses frontiers, is working on a European code of practice that could set new rules.

Advertising to children - especially on television, the most influential medium - is a contentious topic. Children are often regarded as the advertiser's dream: naive, impressionable consumers who can easily be manipulated into spending their money.

Children also wield a heavy influence on their parents' spending, and advertisers stand accused of encouraging them to apply techniques known as pester-power or psycho-terrorism to bludgeon their parents into satisfying advertising-driven desires.

Attitudes vary from one country to another. Sweden and Norway are the strictest, banning all television advertising aimed at children under 12. In Belgium, this kind of advertising is banned in the Flemish region from five minutes before to five minutes after children's programmes. Greece bans toy advertising on television, although more to protect Greek toy-makers than Greek children.

Acceptance of television advertising to children is greatest in the countries where it has been around longest. In the US and Britain, where commercial television has existed for decades, it is less contentious than in Sweden, where terrestrial commercial television has operated only since 1992. But even in those countries most accustomed to it, there are concerns about the quantity of advertising aimed at children - not least, because it is growing at an extraordinary rate.

According to Mr James McNeal, professor of marketing at Texas A&M University, spending on advertising targeted at children has been growing at 15 to 20 per cent a year for the past six or seven years for a simple reason: children's spending power has been growing at a similar rate.

Mr McNeal says this is not just because parents have been giving their children more pocket money, or even because they have been buying more for their children, although both are true.

It is also because parents are giving children a much bigger say in decisions about what car the family should drive, where the family should go on holiday, how the family house should be furnished and what food the family should eat.

Mr McNeal has coined the word "filiarchy" - as in patriarchy or matriarchy - to describe children's growing power within the family. He says it is caused by a gloomy belief among parents that society will let their children down, and a desire to prepare them for this by giving them as good a start as they can.

Boosted by guilt, the annual income of children aged up to 12 in the US has now reached about $27.5 billion (€25.8 billion). But Mr McNeal says children directly influence spending of around $188 billion in the US and $1,870 billion worldwide.

As advertisers increasingly target these influential young consumers, there are conflicting views about the effects. The available research suggests that most children can understand the difference between television programmes and commercials by the time they are eight. But that does not mean the advertisements do not work.

As for pester power, advertisers say this is just an emotive way of describing something that exists quite separately from advertising.

Mr Martin Phelps, a business director in Ogilvy & Mather's London office, says: "Those who have kids recognise that the whole of life with a child, from the moment they start to communicate, is a negotiation. Advertising plays a part in that negotiation, just as whether or not they have to go to bed does, or whether they can go out and play in the garden."

Sweden's advertising agencies seem to have few difficulties with their country's ban on advertising to children.

"It doesn't do anything but codify existing procedures, and therefore it has had very little effect," says Mr Bjorn Larsson, president of Lowe Brindfors, a big Swedish agency.