ABSTRACT

The field of children, adolescents, and media has been approached from diverse theoretical traditions and perspectives. Each perspective is grounded in a unique scholarly history, frames research questions in accordance with its assumptions, and focuses on different aspects of the relationships between children and media. We start this fascinating journey by introducing some of the most important of these perspectives, by focusing on the different ways in which childhood has been constructed, socially and culturally, and how these constructions contribute to the way we understand children’s relationships with media today. Kirsten Drotner’s opening chapter focuses on media and constructions of childhood. Her

overview explains how concepts of childhood and media are co-constructed in modernity through two major discursive domains. First, in everyday life, media serve as important, public means of articulating selective representations of childhood (e.g., through print news reporting, advertisements, television, and film). She demonstrates how these representations operate as catalysts in defining, handling, and regulating social problems as moral problems. Second, when new media enter the social scene, stark public reactions often follow. Her analysis focuses on situations in which these reactions turn into so-called media panics about children’s media use, employing binary projections of the proper childhood and the future direction of society. Debbie Olson and Giselle Rampaul’s chapter discusses representations of childhood in the

media. They argue that childhood is, and has always been, an unstable concept, variously interpreted and represented according to historical, social, cultural, political, and economic contexts. Social and economic changes led to development of a theory of childhood innocence in which children came to be assigned a “special” status. Along with childhood innocence, whiteness was also implicitly idealized in early representations of childhood. Thus, images of a white childhood came to be considered universal and desirable. Such pictorial representations of children established a standard of what children were expected to look like, as well as contributing to idealized conceptions of childhood itself. However, technological advancement and ideological shifts inevitably changed the way childhood is imagined and understood. This, in turn, created new representations of childhood, particularly within a global context. Such images in the news media and elsewhere reinforce changing attitudes about childhood as it is culturally imagined. Moving from constructions and representations of childhood to children as media audiences,

Uwe Hasebrink and Ingrid Paus-Hasebrink map long-term trends in childhood consumption

of media. They argue that changes in media environments and in children’s media use led to changes in childhood and socialization, as well as children’s development of their view of the world. Through their analysis of how each medium entered children’s everyday lives and how it is used today, they demonstrate how the historical development of media technologies has played a key role in children’s media. Placed in the current context of an increasingly converging media environment, the chapter sets out to develop a more holistic view of children’s media use. A different perspective to children’s relationship with media is rooted in developmental

psychology approaches, as Marina Krcmar discusses in her chapter. She examines four assumptions at work in research on children and media conducted through this perspective: Children and adolescents are qualitatively different from adults; age is a primary variable; all differences are related to development; developmental phenomena and developmental theory are applied selectively in research on children and media. Directives from each assumption are presented. The importance of environment and the roles of quantitative and qualitative research approaches, too, are discussed. These chapters make for a smooth transition to Elizabeth Vandewater’s review of ecological

approaches to the study of children and media. She discusses how and the extent to which ecological perspectives (as represented in ecological theory, systems-theory, and life-course developmental theory) have been incorporated in research on media and children. Brief outlines of the main ideas of these theories are presented, and the ways in which they have informed and generated developmental science systems perspectives is discussed. This review leads to her discussing the current state of scholarship on media and children, and proposing directions for future collective endeavors as media scholars. A central thread in the current interest in children relates to their construction as consumers.

David Buckingham explores the diverse ways in which children are constructed or defined as consumers in both popular and academic discourse. His chapter begins by contrasting the arguments of popular campaigners, who tend to construct children as victims of commercial marketing, with those of marketers, who tend to see children as active and “empowered” by consumer culture. This overview is followed by a discussion of two dominant perspectives within academic research: media effects research and consumer socialization research. Buckingham argues for the extension of these approaches via accounts that look at the social contexts of children’s consumer practices. The final section presents several alternative theoretical approaches that might be developed, drawn from cultural studies, actor network theory, and the anthropology of consumer culture. Each of these approaches moves beyond the polarized approaches presented at the beginning of the chapter. Seamlessly, Karen Orr Vered continues this argument by demonstrating how the multi-

disciplinary and multi-methodological practice of critical studies scholarship intersects with studies of children, childhood, and media. The counter-hegemonic critique implicit in this scholarly practice is traced back to roots in Marxist critical theory seeded by the Frankfurt School scholars, and extended through the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (UK) and French critical traditions. Research conducted in the critical tradition is discussed with examples derived from different methodological approaches. Another variant of a critical approach to scholarship is offered by the extension of feminist

theories to the study of children and media. Dafna Lemish argues that feminist theory can offer the field of children and media significant and original perspectives, in the following four domains: A mapping of gender segregation of children’s leisure culture and explanation of the mechanism driving this segregation; a theoretical understanding of gender as a form of social construction rather than limited biological assumptions; a particular view on the form and role of methodology in the study of children and media; and a model of engaged scholarship attempting to advance progressive social change.