After the Death of Childhood

David Buckingham

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745619330, 9780745619323
• eBook ISBN: 9780745656915
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Marriage & Family Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

What will be the fate of childhood in the twenty-first century? Will children increasingly be living 'media childhoods', dominated by the electronic screen? Will their growing access to adult media help to abolish the distinctions between childhood and adulthood? Or will the advent of new media technologies widen the gaps between the generations still further?

In this book, David Buckingham provides a lucid and accessible overview of recent changes both in childhood and in the media environment. He refutes simplistic moral panics about the negative influence of the media, and the exaggerated optimism about the 'electronic generation'. In the process, he points to the challenges that are posed by the proliferation of new technologies, the privatization of the media and of public space, and the polarization between media-rich and media-poor. He argues that children can no longer be excluded or protected from the adult world of violence, commercialism and politics; and that new strategies and policies are needed in order to protect their rights as citizens and as consumers.

Based on extensive research, After the Death of Childhood takes a fresh look at well-established concerns about the effects of the media on children. It offers a challenging and refreshing approach to the perennial concerns of researchers, parents, educators, media producers and policy-makers.

Part I

2

The Death of Childhood

The notion that children are growing up deprived of childhood has become a staple theme in popular psychology. Over the past three or four decades, it is argued, there has been a radical change in how society treats children, and in how children themselves behave. Critics point to evidence of growing levels of violent crime and sexual activity among the young, and to the steady disintegration of family life; and they argue that the safety and innocence which characterized previous generations’ experience of childhood has been lost forever.

Two books, both published in the US in the early 1980s, were among the first to raise these concerns: David Elkind’s The Hurried Child (1981) and Marie Winn’s Children without Childhood (1984). The very similar slogans on the covers of these books neatly encapsulate the argument: ‘Growing Up Too Fast Too Soon’ (Elkind) and ‘Growing Up Too Fast in the World of Sex and Drugs’ (Winn). Yet while these writers appear to be describing similar phenomena, their analysis of the causes of those phenomena are rather different.

As a child psychologist, Elkind’s starting point is the ‘stress’ which he argues characterizes contemporary children’s lives. He points to growing levels of psychological disturbance brought on by divorce; the rise in teenage pregnancy and venereal disease; and the increasing numbers of young people seeking escape through drug-taking, crime, suicide and religious cults. Children, he argues, are now being ‘hurried’ through childhood by their parents and schools, and by the media. Parents, stressed and frustrated by their own working lives, are increasingly displacing their anxieties on to their children, pressurizing them to succeed academically and in organized sports at ever earlier ages, paralysing them with the fear of failure. Meanwhile, schools have become product-oriented, obsessed with grading and drilling children in ‘basic skills’. Parents are being urged to transform the home into an extension of the school, by providing formal, programmed instruction for their children, rather than the more informal learning of the past.

The media both reflect and produce this ‘hurrying’ of children. Television, Elkind argues, lacks the ‘intellectual barriers’ of older media, since it does not require children to learn to interpret it. By simplifying their access to information, it opens them to experiences that were once reserved for adults: ‘scenes of violence or of sexual intimacy that a young child could not conjure up from a verbal description are presented directly and graphically upon the television screen.’¹ On one level, this means that human experience becomes ‘homogenized’; although since children themselves do not necessarily understand what they watch, television creates a kind of ‘pseudosophistication’, which in turn leads adults to treat children as more grown up than they really are. Elkind makes similar arguments about contemporary children’s books, where the focus on the poor, the disabled, the sick and the emotionally troubled is seen to present a further pressure on children to grow up before their time. Meanwhile, he condemns rock music as emotionally regressive and as an incitement to masturbation and the use of illicit drugs.

The key problem, according to Elkind, is that children are exposed to these experiences before they are ‘emotionally ready’ to handle them:

Hurried children are forced to take on the physical, psychological, and social trappings of adulthood before they are prepared to deal with them. We dress our children in miniature adult costumes (often with designer labels), we expose them to gratuitous sex and violence, and we expect them to cope with an increasingly bewildering social environment – divorce, single parenthood, homosexuality.²

By contrast, Elkind proposes that growing up needs to proceed slowly, at its own pace. Following Piaget’s model of child development, he argues that children will only truly learn when they are ready to do so. Forcing them to skip developmental stages will make it much harder for them to establish a secure sense of their personal identity, and hence leave them unprepared for the difficulties of adolescence.

Marie Winn’s Children without Childhood echoes many of Elkind’s concerns. She too points to a growing epidemic of social problems affecting children; and while she is careful not to exaggerate these, she argues that there has been a general ‘loss of control’ on the part of parents and an overall ‘decline in child supervision’. While problems such as drug-taking and teenage pregnancy have, she argues, always existed among lower social classes, they are now becoming widespread among middle-class children. Like Elkind, Winn is dismayed at the blurring of boundaries between adults and children, and the fact that ‘children look, talk and behave in ways that do not seem very childlike.’³ Using extensive amounts of anecdotal testimony, she argues that most parents are either unconcerned, ignorant or fatalistic in the face of their own powerlessness to alter this situation.

Like Elkind, Winn accuses the media of ‘indoctrinating children into the secrets of adult life’ – by which she means primarily sex and violence. While she shares his concerns about the ‘new realism’ in children’s books, and the focus on ‘gang rape, homosexuality and sadistic violence’ in movies, her primary anxiety is about television:

[Parents] have little chance of controlling their children’s exposure to every variety of adult sexuality, every permutation and combination of human brutality and violence, every aspect of sickness, disease and suffering, every frightening possibility for natural and man-made disaster that might impinge on an innocent and carefree childhood. There is always the television set waiting to undo all their careful plans.⁴

Nevertheless, Winn’s concern about television – which is extensively developed in her earlier book, The Plug-in Drug⁵ – is not only to do with content. Regardless of what they watch, she argues, television deprives children of play, and of other forms of healthy interaction. It is used by too many parents simply as a ‘babysitter’.

Despite their similarities, the diagnoses of these two authors, and hence their prescriptions for change, are rather different. Winn’s position is essentially that of a moral conservative. She is dismayed at the decline of the traditional nuclear family, the growing financial independence of women, the ‘loosening of sexual standards’ and the diminished role of organized religion. She regrets the move towards coeducation, the disapproval of ‘spanking’ children and the increasing public visibility of homosexuality. In these respects, her book clearly belongs to the moral backlash against 1960s ‘permissiveness’ which characterized the 1980s of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

By contrast, the problem for Elkind seems to be not so much permissiveness, but the lack of it. While he shares some of Winn’s broader moral concerns, he bemoans the move away from earlier child-rearing practices based on the notion of ‘self-expression’. While this approach may have led to ‘spoiled children’, who remain children for too long, the pendulum has now swung too far in the other direction: ‘hurried children’ are subjected to far too much pressure and discipline by adults.

However, Winn and Elkind are united in their desire to move back to an earlier era – to what Winn without apparent irony calls ‘the Golden Age of Innocence’, an era in which (she tells us) ‘innocence truly was bliss, once upon a time.’⁶ Both writers seem to locate this period in the earlier part of this century, or in the previous one. Nevertheless, both are aware that this Golden Age was itself a particular stage in a longer history of childhood. Winn, for example, compares the ‘uncivilized’ approach to child-rearing in the Middle Ages with the emphasis on protectiveness and careful nurture which emerged during the nineteenth century. Children, she notes, were gradually separated from the adult world in order that they could be prepared for their future roles in an increasingly complex industrial society: ‘Slowly and painfully, children were helped to acquire such graces as co-operation, tactfulness, and social sensitivity, skills they would need someday in the new kinds of work available to adults in towns and cities.’⁷ In this era, Winn argues, children displayed ‘a relatively docile acceptance of their role as dependent beings who didn’t have many choices about their lives or even their daily behaviour’⁸ – and, as a result, they came to behave in ways which came to be seen as characteristically child-like.

Now, by contrast, children are much less deferential to those in authority. Their ‘critical powers’, according to Winn, have been ‘too early awakened’.⁹ They are aware that adults are not always to be trusted or respected simply because they are adults. Children, it seems, are even claiming the right to choose what clothes they will wear!

Significantly, both writers acknowledge that the developments they describe could be seen as part of broader moves towards equality in society which have occurred in the wake of the Civil Rights movement and the rebirth of feminism. Yet it is with children that both are seeking to draw the line. Rather than extending equality to children, Elkind argues, we need to give them time apart from the adult world to learn and grow. It is not discrimination, he suggests, to emphasize children’s ‘special needs’; on the contrary, ‘it is the only way that true equality can be attained.’¹⁰

For Winn, the implication here is clear: parents should be actively reinforcing these boundaries between adults and children. They should be doing less preparing, and more protecting. Parents have to reassert their authority, and thereby restore to children their right ‘to be a child’. Elkind’s analysis is perhaps less overtly coercive, although it is equally normative. Rather than emphasizing the responsibilities of parents to keep their children innocent, Elkind implies that this will occur naturally if children are not forced to grow up before they are ‘ready’. In this account, therefore, psychological norms stand in for – and inevitably support – social norms. While both writers recognize the existence of historical change, they ultimately fall back on the notion of childhood as a ‘natural’ phenomenon, which is implicitly seen as timeless.

Literacy myths

Despite the differences between them, the arguments developed in these books represent a powerful mind-set in contemporary popular thinking about childhood which appears to unite those of contrasting political and moral persuasions. They embody a growing sense of anxiety about social change, and particularly about the changing power relationships between adults and children, which is characteristic of much journalistic commentary on child-rearing. Yet, as we shall see throughout this book, several of the themes they discuss have also featured – albeit in somewhat more cautious terms – in academic studies of childhood, and particularly of children’s relationships with the media.

In pursuing these ideas, I turn now to four works written by academics: Neil Postman’s The Disappearance of Childhood and Joshua Meyrowitz’s No Sense of Place, both published in the early 1980s; and Barry Sanders’s A is for Ox and Shirley Steinberg and Joe Kincheloe’s collection Kinderculture, both published in the mid-1990s. Again, the subtitles or cover slogans are symptomatic: ‘How TV is changing children’s lives’ (Postman); The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behaviour (Meyrowitz); The Collapse of Literacy and the Rise of Violence in an Electronic Age (Sanders); and The Corporate Construction of Childhood (Steinberg and Kincheloe). As these titles suggest, all four books provide a peculiarly one-dimensional analysis of the causes of these developments. Where Elkind and Winn attempt to explain contemporary changes in childhood by means of more general arguments about approaches to child-rearing, these authors all identify a singular villain of the piece: namely, the electronic media.

Postman’s book is the earliest and most popularly written of the four. Like Elkind and Winn, he offers a range of different kinds of evidence to prove that childhood – or at least the distinction between adults and children – is disappearing. He points to the demise of children’s traditional games and distinctive styles of dress; the increasing homogenization of children’s and adults’ leisure pursuits, language, eating habits and tastes in entertainment; and the increase in child crime, drug-taking, sexual activity and teenage pregnancy. He is particularly dismayed by the erotic use of children in commercials and movies, the prevalence of ‘adult’ themes in children’s books and what he sees as the misguided emphasis on ‘children’s rights’.

Nevertheless, like the other authors discussed here, Postman is under no illusions that childhood is a timeless phenomenon. Following the work of the French historian Philippe Ariés,¹¹ he traces the ‘invention’ and evolution of childhood since the Middle Ages. In his own words, this is a story of ‘how the printing press created childhood and how the electronic media are “disappearing” it’.¹² As this statement implies, Postman attributes a determining significance to technologies and the human attributes which they (somehow automatically) require or cultivate. Print, he argues, effectively created our modern notion of individuality; and it was this ‘intensified sense of self’ that led to the ‘flowering of childhood’. Print required an apprenticeship in literacy, and hence the invention of schools, to check children’s ‘exuberance’ and to cultivate ‘quietness, immobility, contemplation [and] precise regulation of bodily functions’.¹³ Yet the printing press and the school not only created the child: in the process, they also created ‘the modern concept of the adult’. Adulthood became, in Postman’s terms, a symbolic, not just a biological, achievement.

Like Winn, Postman sees the advantage of print as its ability to preserve adult ‘secrets’ from those who have not yet acquired literacy. Television, by contrast, is a ‘total disclosure medium’, which renders information ‘uncontrollable’. The ‘dark and fugitive mysteries’ of adult life (and particularly of sex) are, he suggests, no longer hidden from children. Television effectively abolishes shame, a quality which Postman sees as a prerequisite for the existence of childhood.

However, Postman’s view of the differences between these media is primarily concerned not with their content, but with their implications for cognition. Following Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan,¹⁴ he argues that print is essentially symbolic and linear, and hence cultivates abstraction and logical thinking:

Almost all the characteristics we associate with adulthood are those that are (or were) either generated or amplified by the requirements of a fully literate culture: the capacity for self-restraint, a tolerance for delayed gratification, a sophisticated ability to think conceptually and sequentially, a preoccupation with both historical continuity and the future, a high valuation of reason and hierarchical order.¹⁵

By contrast, Postman argues, television is a visual medium. It requires no special skills to interpret, nor does it cultivate any. It offers no propositions, and it does not have to conform to rules of evidence or logic: it is essentially irrational.

The implications of these technological changes for relations between adults and children were thus straightforward. Through print and schooling, Postman argues, ‘adults found themselves with unprecedented control over the symbolic environment of the young, and were therefore able and required to set forth the conditions by which a child was to become an adult.’¹⁶ In the age of television, this power and control has accordingly become impossible to exert.

Only just below the surface of Postman’s text is a form of moral conservatism which has much in common with that of Marie Winn. What seems particularly troubling for him about the ‘television age’ is the demise of ‘good manners’. While Postman distances himself from what he sees as the ‘arrogance’ of the so-called Moral Majority, he explicitly shares its desire to ‘turn back the clock’. He supports ‘its attempts to restore a sense of inhibition and reverence to sexuality’ and to establish schools that will insist on ‘rigorous standards of civilité’; and he urges parents to impress on their children the value of ‘self-restraint in manners, language and style’ and the need for ‘de...

Table of contents

• Cover page
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Back Cover