Media and the Make-Believe Worlds of Children

When Harry Potter Meets Pokemon in Disneyland

Maya Gotz, Dafna Lemish, Hyesung Moon, Amy Aidman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135607265
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Studi sulla comunicazione

Media and the Make-Believe Worlds of Children offers new insights into children's descriptions of their invented or "make-believe" worlds, and the role that the children's experience with media plays in creating these worlds. Based on the results of a cross-cultural study conducted in the United States, Germany, Israel, and South Korea, it offers an innovative look at media's role on children's creative lives.

This distinctive volume:
*outlines the central debates and research findings in the area of children, fantasy worlds, and the media;
*provides a descriptive account of children's make-believe worlds and their wishes for actions they would like to take in these worlds;
*highlights the centrality of media in children's make believe worlds;
*emphasizes the multiple creative ways in which children use media as resources in their environment to express their own inner worlds; and
*suggests the various ways in which the tension between traditional gender portrayals that continue to dominate media texts and children's wishes to act are presented in their fantasies.

The work also demonstrates the value of research in unveiling the complicated ways in which media are woven into the fabric of children's everyday lives, examining the creative and sophisticated uses they make of their contents, and highlighting the responsibility that producers of media texts for children have in offering young viewers a wide array of role models and narratives to use in their fantasies. The downloadable resources provide full-color images of the artwork produced during the study.

This book will appeal to scholars and graduate students in children and media, early childhood education, and developmental psychology. It can be used in graduate level courses in these areas.

III

Central Themes: Gender and Culture

6

The Gendered Nature of Children’s Make-Believe Worlds

The centrality of gender in children’s make-believe worlds became immediately evident upon examination of the pictures and stories. In all four countries, the girls’ pictures lean toward an emphasis on harmony and have notably fewer media traces than boys’ pictures. Boys’ pictures, in contrast, are characterized by conflict and fighting, and are loaded with obvious links to relevant media texts. Our intuitive first impressions are validated in a quantitative mapping. However, a more sensitive and in-depth analysis of the less obvious differences hidden behind what is considered as “typically girls” and “typically boys” reveals a much more complex picture that cannot be that easily forced into a neat scheme. The discussion in this chapter offers interpretation and analysis of gender-specific motifs found in our study and grounds it in what we know from related research on gender, childhood, and media.

A QUANTITATIVE OVERVIEW

Because the study is based on qualitative methods of investigation and evaluation, quantitative mapping serves to illustrate some of the gender-specific findings. However, the numbers refer to a nonrepresentative qualitative sample and therefore, are not meant to suggest any valid generalizations.

Of the 193 children studied, there were 110 girls, which comprised 57% of the sample. It was more difficult to solicit boys in the three countries where participation was optional and required an active decision to join in (Germany, Israel, and the United States), making it necessary to deliberately pursue boys’ groups with greater efforts. Apparently, the topic of the study itself as well as the methods employed—drawing, talking about inner worlds—was more attractive to girls than to boys.

The breakdown of the children’s make-believe world stories and pictures is presented in Table 6.1. Clear gendered emphases emerge from these cases: 55% of the girls’ cases imagine worlds of harmony with nature, animals, and people. Lagging far behind are the make-believe worlds of foreign lands (13%), followed by the world of supernatural power (8%) and that of royalty (7%). The category of technology was the one most rarely identified in the girls’ cases.

In the 83 boys’ drawings and narratives, the themes characterizing their worlds are less clearly dominated by one category. However, there are clearly identifiable leanings toward the areas of fighting and threat (31%), and of amusement (20%). The next most popular category (16%) for boys is the world of harmony with nature and animals.

Some decisive gender-related differences are evident in the wishes to act as well. When counting only the most obvious and explicit wish to act, we find that almost 39% of the girls wish to experience well-being in their make-believe worlds followed by the wish to be connected to others (24%) (see Table 6.2).

As for boys, 43% express the wish to experience thrill, similar in proportion to the girls’ wish to live in harmony.

TABLE 6.1
Girls’ and Boys’ Make-Believe Worlds

Worlds	Girls N = 110	Boys N = 83
Harmony and peace	60 (55%)	13 (16%)
Foreign land	14 (13%)	5 (6%)
Supernatural	9 (8%)	5 (6%)
Royalty	8 (7%)	1 (1%)
Sensual pleasures	7 (6%)	3 (4%)
Amusement	6 (5%)	17 (20%)
Travel	3 (3%)	7 (8%)
Conflict and threat	2 (2%)	26 (31%)
Technology	1 (1%)	6 (7%)

TABLE 6.2
Girls’ and Boys’ Wishes to Act

Wish to act	Girls N = 110	Boys N = 83
Experience well-being	43 (39%)	12 (14%)
Bonding with others	26 (24%)	10 (12%)
Experience thrill	12 (11%)	36 (43%)
Displaying specialness	10 (9%)	12 (14%)
Acting independently	19 (9%)	4 (5%)
Protecting/being protected	9 (8%)	9 (11%)

Overall, we can state that the prevailing wish for girls is to project themselves into a world of harmony, where the primary wish is to experience well-being and bonding with others. As for boys, the dominant wish is to experience thrill in a world of conflict and threat or a world of amusement. However, as is clear in the tables, a variety of alternatives to these dominant themes came out of the children’s stories.

Media Traces in Make-Belive Worlds

Children’s make-believe worlds have media traces of different and overlapping origins, as discussed in previous chapters. Our analysis identified gender-specific trends in relationship to specific media influence (see Table 6.3).

TABLE 6.3
Gendered Media Traces

Media Traces	Girls N = 110	Boys N = 83
Media traces total	61 (55.5%)	61 (73.5%)
Explicit media traces	49 (80%)	48 (79%)
Implicit media traces	12 (20%)	13 (21%)
No media traces	49 (44.5%)	22 (26.5%)

As already mentioned, the pictures of the boys seemed to be more media-oriented at first sight. Many dinosaurs and Pokémon and Digimon rule the make-believe worlds. The pictures of girls seemed to be less imprinted by media references. However, when we listen closely to the girls’ stories, they themselves mention references to media that we may not have identified on the basis of the stories and pictures alone. Even when including these implicit traces, a closer look suggests that the presence of media traces in girls’ make-believe worlds are quantitatively lower than those of boys. This holds true in all four countries. The first impression therefore does not deceive, however it is less powerful than it appears to be at first sight.

Boys’ fantasies have more media traces in nearly all the subcategories included in the quantitative breakdown (see Table 6.4). The widest difference shows up in relation to the incorporation of media-related characters.

Boys’ stories connect more closely with, and are more deeply saturated by, the original media content. It is not unusual for their stories to incorporate a combination of settings, characters, and stories. In contrast, girls’ stories are more likely to abstract a single element from the original media—for example, a specific object, costume, or piece of information. Twenty-six percent of boys’ stories incorporated all three categories (settings, characters, stories) in individual make-believe worlds. Only 2% of the girls’ worlds included media traces from all three categories. Twenty-eight percent of the boys incorporated two out of the three categories, in comparison to 19% of the girls. Forty-eight percent of the boys’ stories included media traces in just one category, compared to 79% of the girls’ stories. This helps explain why our first impression of boys’ make-believe worlds is so strikingly dominated by the media, much more than the gap really proves to be. These findings beg questions such as: Are visual images more salient for boys or easier for them to draw? Do visual images play a bigger role in their imaginations, in terms of visualizing their fantasies? And, as a result, does borrowing from the media serve as a visual task?

TABLE 6.4
Gendered Meida Traces Contents

GIRLS’ MAKE-BELIEVE WORLDS OF HARMONY

In more than half of the make-believe worlds (56%) girls represented themselves in their own pictures. It is striking, however, that this percentage differs from country to country. In Korea, more than 70% of the girls painted themselves, whereas in Israel, only about 30% did so. Despite our efforts, we were not able to provide any possible explanation for this difference.

Girls draw themselves with an obvious hairstyle, preferably braids or ponytails, across all countries. This is most striking in South Korea, where only one girl, Hyon’ah (G, SK-5), refrained from doing so as she was about to meet Jesus in her make-believe world. Apparently, the hairstyle for girls is an iconic way to symbolize their femininity as a girl or a young woman. Because the secondary sexual characteristics are not yet formed in this age group, the signification of hair becomes a clear gender sign. Clothes figure in a similar manner. Somewhat fewer than half the girls who represent themselves in their drawings are pictured wearing a skirt or a dress in their make-believe world. In South Korea, this may be based on the everyday experience of the school uniform.

Beyond what is considered everyday female clothing, some chose to dress themselves in old-fashioned baroque dresses or gowns. Women’s attire according to the girls in our study, is a form of gendered-self-representation, a way of marking themselves as feminine and expressing themselves as beautiful. Appearances, as we know, are closely related to presumptions about “essence.” The cultural connection between the construct of being a girl and a representation of the girl through the appearance code is highlighted through these choices (Tseelon, 1995). The centrality of physical appearance and attractiveness in the definition of femininity and the value of individual girls and women is nothing new in human societies. Our cultures strongly encourage girls to equate their physical appearance with their personal identity through the indoctrination of both traditional and mediated socializing agents in an everlasting quest for beautification. Through this highly commodified and commercialized process, girls are led to believe that they can achieve power, control, and their “ultimate” goal of heterosexual romance (Mazzarella, 1999; McRobbie, 1993; Peirce, 1990).

The analysis of the pictures of the make-believe worlds suggest that 8- to 10-year-old girls indeed define themselves to a large extent through appearance. However, surprisingly enough, they hardly ever refer to appearance or talk about it in the interviews. Paying close attention to appearance and drawing themselves in detail seem to be done unconsciously, inattentive to the meaning involved. The need to do so seems to go unnoticed by the girls, as a taken-for-granted, “natural” way of things, typical of uncritical adherence to social norms.

In addition to expressing who they are through beauty, in several of the stories, the girls reveal that their perception of themselves takes into account others’ perspectives on them. Saya’s (G, GR-4) make-believe world, for example, is located in a “land of Indians” (Native Americans). According to the girl, the starting point for this is that in her own environment, she is often mistakenly perceived to be “Indian.” Because she has black hair (her parents are Vietnamese by ethnicity), she integrates this as a positive perspective on her own physical appearance. Reactions from others are incorporated here into the self-image in her make-believe world. In a different case, it is a personality trait that a girl uses to set herself apart. Güler (G, GR-14), of Turkish descent, describes her make-believe world like this:

I always wanted to see the very hot Africa. I’m interested in the animals there. I see a lion, a kangaroo, a bird and also a rabbit. And, of course, many plants and trees. The lion and the rabbit look at me and the bird and the kangaroo are talking about me. What sort of girl I am? It is very interesting for them to see nice people and not only those who want to hunt them …. I have nearly all the jungle stories at home on tape and this is why I’m so interested in Africa.

Güler imagines how others talk about her. She portrays a moment that is experienced as pleasant because she is something special through being recognized by others as nice and not wanting to do harm. Tali (G, IS-6), expresses her desire for positive attention from others when she imagines herself appearing on stage with her favorite singer. Many spotlights are directed to the center of the stage and when she appears, the audience applauds her: “You can see the stage and the spotlight and people say: ‘Applaud Tali H.!’” Young’son (G, SK-12), talks about her thoughts:

My thoughts tell me that I have to prepare everything thoroughly. But now I can hear what the clock tells me. It says: “You have done a lot last week. You practiced the piano, read books, and slept. But best of all is that you have been good and donated something at church. You have shared your pocket money.” I reply to the clock “thank you very much.” In the future I also want to be good.

A case can be made for saying that these girls are internalizing other people’s ideas about what constitutes being a “good girl” and, for them, this is important enough to play a key role in imagining their ideal selves.

This desire for positive judgment and praise from the outside was also found in the research situation itself. Tanja (G, GR-53), for example, draws herself in a romantic setting in the dress of princess Sissi. During the process of drawing her picture, a dialogue between Tanja and her friends is overheard by the field researcher. She reported that Tanja explains that she has originally drawn a queen or princess, but now she doesn’t know if she can mention that in the interview: “They may think I’m arrogant.” The friend responds: “Then just say it is only a court lady.” In the interview, Tanja takes the middle way out and says she is “a court lady or a princess or so.” Even during the painting process, Tanja anticipates the outside judgment of the interviewers themselves and includes it in her self-presentation. Although taking into account all the subtleties involved in such moments, it seems that for many of the girls in the study, presenting themselves and their body in their make-believe worlds is a satisfying experience. This study provides evidence that the young girls who participated in this research process have already integrated into their self-image an outside perspective on their appearance and personality. Through the imagined self, they seem to experience the power to act. However, as Christian-Smith (1990) reminded us, in this process the girl accepts “another’s version of reality as her own: how she should behave, think, and look. The ability to define reality for another is certainly one of the more important forms of social power” (p. 54).

Worlds of Harmoney, Care, and Relationships

In all four countries the greatest number of gir...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• About the Authors
• I Studying Make-Believe Worlds
• II Research Findings: The Worlds, the Children, and the Media
• III Central Themes: Gender and Culture
• IV Conclusion
• References
• Child Index
• Media Texts Index
• Author Index
• Subject Index