I took my 3 1/2-year-old daughter grocery shopping recently, to a market we have walked through dozens of times. We rolled past the yogurt case that we always pass on our way from free-range chickens to lowfat milk--and like a child possessed, she screeched to a halt, pointed to a package on the uppermost shelf and announced, "I will like that. Let's get some."

This from a child who willingly ate plain yogurt only until she was able to hold the spoon herself, who has never so much as glanced at this display before. Why did she want a four-pack of Dannon Sprinkl'ins, two strawberry-banana and two cherry-vanilla four-ounce servings, each topped with a clear plastic envelope of rainbow-hued candies?

"It has sprinkles," she explained, as though our house were not a candy-free zone, as though she knew what a sprinkle was.

"Have you seen them before?"

"Annie has them in her lunch box." She was fairly quivering with desire. "Put them in the cart, mommy."

So I did. Just to see what would happen.

For The Dannon Co., that purchase represented a successful step into the marketing equivalent of the Promised Land. Children are among the few consumers who still have time and money on their hands. The recession gnaws away at adult discretionary income and at the exalted position that name brands have always held over their discount competitors. The children's market continues to grow: American children between the ages of 4 and 12 spent $8.6 billion in 1991, and their spending power is on the rise. According to James U. McNeal, Texas A&M University marketing professor and co-author of a recent magazine article entitled "Born to Shop," children with two working parents have become involved in an increasing number of purchase decisions. He estimates that the 12-and-younger set has a vote on about $147 billion in spending each year.

More to the point, children have decades of buying power ahead of them--and unlike their parents, who carry awareness of 1,500 brand names in their heads, they have no preconceived preferences. They are a blank slate.

The combination--money to spend and an open mind--makes children irresistible to American business, and places them at the center of a heated controversy over whether, and how much, to sell to an audience whose critical faculties are still in the caterpillar stage. Critics like Peggy Charren, whose Action for Children's Television advocacy group waged a 25-year war for regulation of programming and commercials, believe that advertising takes advantage of impressionable youngsters. "Children," says Charren, "are the only unpaid sales force in the history of America. Advertisers don't expect kids to buy the product. The kids are being used to sell the product to the parent."