ABSTRACT
Bedrooms, as the 1960s Beach Boys ballad “In My Room” goes, are places for “dreamin’ and schemin’,” and, as the bedrooms of Crisdan and Jana referred to in the previous chapter suggest, are also often perfect havens of “hyper-consumerism” and popular culture fantasy. From Mickey Mouse sleepwear to Lion King bed linen, to Pooh murals to toy-boxes full of Polly Pockets or Etch A Sketches and Lego, children's bedrooms tend to be repositories for contemporary kids’ culture. In one sense, children's bedrooms are controlled by adults in terms of overall design and layout, and children may be subject to rules of behavior around neatness or whether the door has to be open, and so on. And of course, the idea of the room itself can have a type of regulatory function. The imperatives of “clean up your room” or “go to your room,” for example, may serve to counter any sense of the child being in charge of his or her domain – even if the room is filled with highly desired play objects. Being sent to one's room, as we see represented in the children's book by Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are (1983) is regarded as punishment; it is not the same as going there freely – choosing to be in one's room instead of in a more public space. At the same time though, the child's bedroom is the one official place of some privacy – and a place where there can be at least some expression of individual taste. Max's fantasy about the wild things can only happen in a space where Max is king. And in contemporary urban spaces, where children are more likely to live in small apartments and not in large, rambling houses with attics and basements or backyards (all places where unofficial private spaces can be claimed in the form of forts and so on), the bedroom takes on even more importance. As Henry Jenkins writes:
My son, Henry, now 16, has never had a backyard.
He has grown up in various apartment complexes, surrounded by asphalt parking lots with, perhaps, a small grass buffer from the street. Children were prohibited by apartment policy from playing on the grass or from racing their tricycles in the basements or from doing much of anything else that might make noise, annoy the non-childbearing population, cause damage to the facilities, or put themselves at risk. There was, usually, a city park some blocks away that we could go to on outings a few times a week and where we could watch him play. Henry could claim no physical space as his own, except his toy-strewn room, and he rarely got outside earshot. Once or twice, when I became exasperated by my son's constant presence around the house, I would forget all this and tell him he should go outside and play. He would look at me with confusion and ask, “Where?” (1998b: 263).
