The Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev Dr Rowan Williams, has endorsed a report which aims to alert the public to the fact that children are under threat from a flood of marketing and advertising aimed directly at the young.

The report, entitled 'Commercialisation of Childhood', suggests that children are "engulfed" by images, often of a sexually suggestive nature, about how they should look and what items they should own.

Parents were being undermined by the non-stop barrage, which "exploited children's emotional vulnerabilities in the name of profit".

The report explained that an average 10-year-old had "internalised 300 to 400 brands - perhaps 20 times the number of birds in the wild that they could name".

British children were found to be among the most materialistic in the world, and ahead of even the Americans, the report said.

The report has been released amid an inquiry by the Children's Society into childhood by Lord Layard, which will release its report in 2007.

Dr Williams told that the document was "timely and pertinent", according to The Telegraph, and expressed that the marketing of children could be behind rising levels of stress, depression and low self-esteem in children.

The Church of England head said, "There is an increasing political and social consensus that something needs to be done to safeguard children from the worst excesses of direct marketing and the pressures of commercialisation."

The research by Compass was compiled by referring to a number of different sources, and resulted in a stark warning that marketing children was having a huge and potentially damaging influence on the future of society.

Susan Linn, author of Consuming Kids, said that female singers "dress like quintessential male fantasies of teenybopper hookers and sing songs about sex written by middle-aged men," according to the Telegraph.

A former head teacher and author of Toxic Childhood, Sue Palmer, also expressed her concerns, saying that children's clothing was now being designed in "adult styles to expose a lot of flesh", reported The Telegraph.

Current reports have highlighted Wal-Mart as an example. The company has posted on its website a section called Toyland, where children can pick items from a conveyor belt and enter their parent's email addresses. The list then gets used by the company to "help pester your parents" for the toys they have chosen.

Wal-Mart has responded: "Kids have been writing lists for Christmas presents for hundreds of years. All we've done is put a modern slant on the tradition."

The Compass report concluded: "Millions of pounds are spent conditioning children to become young consumers. Who is forming our children - parents, guardians, friends, families, teachers, community workers - or an army of psychologists, branding gurus, marketing experts, advertisers who are spending billions to shape young minds in the name of profit.

"Can children be children before they are consumers?"