Kinderculture

The Corporate Construction of Childhood

Shirley R. Steinberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780813344898
• eBook ISBN: 9780429974724
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

America is a corporatized society defined by a culture of consumerism, and the youth market is one of the groups that corporations target most. By marketing directly to children, through television, movies, radio, video games, toys, books, and fast food, advertisers have produced a 'kinderculture'. In this eye-opening book, editor Shirley R. Steinberg reveals the profound impact that our purchasing-obsessed culture has on our children and argues that the experience of childhood has been reshaped into something that is prefabricated.

Analyzing the pervasive influence of these corporate productions, top experts in the fields of education, sociology, communications, and cultural studies contribute incisive essays that students, parents, educators, and general readers will find insightful and entertaining. Including seven new chapters, this third edition is thoroughly updated with examinations of the icons that shape the values and consciousness of today's children, including Twilight, True Blood, and vampires, hip hop, Hannah Montana, Disney, and others.

Chapter 1

Kinderculture: Mediating, Simulacralizing, and Pathologizing the New Childhood

Shirley R. Steinberg

ON JUNE 30, 2010, La Vanguardia noted a poll listing the top one hundred most influential newsmakers in the world. Among the group ranked were Taylor Swift (twelve), Miley Cyrus (thirteen), and the Jonas Brothers (forty). In the six years since the publication of the second edition of Kinderculture, the world has changed. Along with a sweeping tsunami of politics, religious influences, struggles, and advancing web 2.0 globalization comes an incredible phenomenon, kinderculture: Children and youth have become infantilized by popular culture, schools, and adults, and while being considered “too” young for almost anything, at the same time, they are being marketed to as seasoned adults. The result is a consumer public of little girls, for example, who wear chastity rings and hip-clinging jogging pants with “Kiss My Booty” in glitter on the backside. With one voice, adults tell kids to stay clean, avoid sex and drugs, go to Disneyland, and make vows of celibacy … with another other voice, the corporate side markets booty clothing, faux bling, and sexualized images of twelve-year-olds. This edition of Kinderculture adds to the other editions by claiming that new times have created a new childhood. However, these new times are conservative and liberal, sexual and celibate, and innocent and seasoned. Evidence of this dramatic cultural change surrounds each of us, but many individuals have not yet noticed it. When Joe Kincheloe and I wrote the first edition of Kinder-culture in 1997, many people who made their living studying or caring for children had not yet recognized this phenomenon. By the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century, more and more people had begun to understand this historic change, however many child professionals remained oblivious to these social and cultural alterations. Now, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, the notions of childhood and youth are more complex, more pathologized, and more alien to adults who educate and parent.

In the domains of psychology, education, and to a lesser degree sociology, few observers have seriously studied the ways that the information explosion so characteristic of our contemporary era has operated to undermine traditional notions of childhood. Those who have shaped, directed, and used contemporary information technology have played an exaggerated role in the reformulation of childhood. Kinderculture analyzes these changes in childhood, especially the role that information technology has played in this process. Of course, information technology alone has not produced a new era of childhood. Numerous social, political, and economic factors have operated to produce such changes. Our focus here is not to cover all of these issues but to question the ways media in particular have helped construct what I am calling “the new childhood.”

Childhood is a social and historical artifact—not simply a biological entity. Many argue that childhood is a natural phase of growing up, of becoming an adult. The cardinal concept here involves the format of this human phase that has been produced by social, cultural, political, and economic forces operating upon it. Indeed, what is labeled as “traditional childhood” is only about 150 years old. In the Middle Ages, for example, children participated daily in the adult world, gaining knowledge of vocational and life skills as part of such engagement. The concept of children as a particular classification of human beings demanding special treatment differing from adults had not yet developed in the Middle Ages.

Socially Constructed Childhood

Childhood is a creation of society that is subject to change whenever major social transformations take place. The zenith of the traditional childhood lasted from about 1850 to 1950. Protected from the dangers of the adult world, many children (up until the twentieth century, boys) during this period were removed from factories and placed into schools. As the prototype of the modern family developed in the late nineteenth century, “proper” parental behavior toward children coalesced around notions of tenderness and adult accountability for children’s welfare. By 1900 many believed that childhood was a birthright—a perspective that eventuated in a biological, not a cultural, definition of childhood. Emerging in this era of the protected child, modern child psychology was inadvertently constructed by the tacit assumptions of the period. The great child psychologists, from Erik Erikson to Arnold Gesell to Jean Piaget, viewed child development as shaped by biological forces.

Piaget’s brilliance was constrained by his nonhistorical, socially de-contextualized scientific approach. What he observed as the genetic expression of child behavior in the early twentieth century he generalized to all cultures and historical eras—an error that holds serious consequences for those concerned with children. Considering biological stages of child development fixed and unchangeable, teachers, psychologists, parents, welfare workers, and the community at large view and judge children along a fictional taxonomy of development. Those children who don’t “measure up” will be relegated to the land of low and self-fulfilling expectations. Those who “make the grade” will find that their racial and economic privilege will be confused with ability (Polakow, 1992; Postman, 1994). Kinderculture joins the emerging body of literature that questions the biological assumptions of “classical” child psychology (Kincheloe, 2008).

Living in a historical period of great change and social upheaval, critical observers are just beginning to notice changing social and cultural conditions in relation to this view of childhood. Categories of child development appropriated from modernist psychology may hold little relevance for raising and educating contemporary children. In the 1950s, 80 percent of all children lived in homes where their two biological parents were married to each other (Lipsky and Abrams, 1994). No one has to be told that families have changed in the past fifty years. Volumes have been written specifying the scope and causes of the social transformation. Before the 1980s ended, children who lived with their two biological parents had fallen to merely 12 percent. Children of divorced parents—a group made up of more than half of the North American population—are almost three times as likely as children raised in two-parent homes to suffer emotional and behavioral difficulties—maybe more the result of parental conflict than the actual divorce (Mason and Steadman, 1997). Despite such understandings, social institutions have been slow to recognize different, nontraditional family configurations and the special needs they encounter. Without support, the contemporary “postmodern” family, with its plethora of working and single mothers, is beset with problems emanating from the feminization of poverty and the vulnerable position of women in both the public and private spaces (Polakow, 1992).

Paradigms for Studying Childhood: The Positivist View of Children

It is important to place Kinderculture in paradigmatic context, to understand what I am promoting here in relation to other scholarship on childhood studies and childhood education. To begin with, we are directly challenging the positivist view of children promoted in mainstream articulations of psychology, sociology, education, and anthropology. Positivism is an epistemological position maintaining that all knowledge of worth is produced by the traditional scientific method. All scientific knowledge constructed in this context is thus proclaimed neutral and objective. Critics of positivism (see Kincheloe, 1993, 2001, 2003, 2004, 2008) argue that because of the narrow nature of what positivist research studies (what it can study given its rules of analysis), it often overlooks powerful normative and ideological assumptions built into its research design. In this naïve realistic context it often seeks empirical proof of what are normative or political assertions—for example, that adults always know better when it comes to issues involving children.

A key goal of critics of positivism involves bringing these normative and ideological assumptions to the surface so observers can gain a much more textured perspective of what research involves and indicates. Indeed, critics of positivism insist that one dimension of research involves the researcher’s analysis of his or her own assumptions, ideologies, and values, and how they shape the knowledge produced. In such a spirit, the editors and authors of Kinderculture openly admit their antipositivist, hermeneu-tic epistemological orientations. Concurrently, we admit our critical democratic values, our vision of race, class, gender, and sexual equality, and the necessity of exposing the effects of power in shaping individual identity and political/educational purpose. This is not an act of politicization of research; research has always been politicized. Instead, we are attempting to understand and act ethically in light of such politicization.

In the positivist perspective, children are assumed to be subservient and dependent on adults as part of the order of the cosmos. In this context adults are seen as having a “natural” prerogative to hold power over children. Positivists turn to biology to justify such assumptions, contending that the physical immaturity of children is manifested in other domains as inferiority, an absence of development, incompleteness, and weakness. One does not have to probe deeply into these biological assumptions to discern similarities between the positivist hierarchy of adults and children and the one subordinating “emotional” women to “rational” men. In our challenge to the positivist view of children, we focus on age and generation to depict children as different from adults but not inferior to them. Children are not merely entities on their way to adulthood; they are individuals intrinsically valuable for who they presently are. When positivists view children as lesser than adults, they consistently ignore the way power operates to oppress children around the axes of race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, etc. The positivist construction of the “vulnerable” child in this context actually becomes more vulnerable as real and specific threats are overlooked because childhood is viewed as a naturally vulnerable state. The threats of different social, economic, political, and cultural “childhoods” are erased (Mason and Steadman, 1997).

The positivist view of childhood has been firmly grounded on developmental psychology’s universal rules of child development. Regardless of historical or social context, these rules lay out the proper development of “normal” children. This mythos of the universal innocent and developing child transforms cultural dimensions of childhood into something produced by nature. By the second decade of the twentieth century, this universal norm for the developing child had been established on the basis of “scientific authority,” based almost exclusively on North American white, middle-class norms and experiences. Schools fell into line, developing a white, middle-class, patriarchal curriculum that reflected the norms of proper development. Reformers, blessed with the imprimatur of science, based their efforts to regulate play on the principles of developmental psychology. Advocates of municipal playgrounds, the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts worked to make sure that children made appropriate use of leisure time (Spigel, 1998).

The decontextualized aspect of the positivist view of childhood shapes numerous problems for those who don’t fit into the dominant cultural bases of the proper development of normal children. In failing to understand the impact of race, class, gender, linguistics, national origin, etc., positivism fails to understand the nature of and the reasons for differences between children. Too often—especially in twenty-first-century education, with its obsession with standards, standardization, and testing—such differences are viewed as deficiencies. In this posi-tivist regime of truth, children from lower socioeconomic, nonwhite, or immigrant backgrounds are relegated to the lower rungs of the developmental ladder. The idea that life experiences and contextual factors might affect development is not considered in the positivist paradigm because it does not account for such social and cultural dynamics (Mason and Steadman, 1997).

In addition, as positivism came to delineate the scientific dimensions of child development, male psychologists replaced mothers as child-rearing experts. In the early part of the twentieth century, the psychologist took on a socially important role. Many people believed that if scientific principles were not followed, innocent, malleable children would be led en masse into immorality and weakness. A significant feature of these scientific principles involved exposing children only to developmentally appropriate adult knowledge. The secret knowledge of adulthood, the positivist psychologists believed, should only be delivered to children at appropriate times in their development. With these ideas in mind, one can better understand the impact TV made on a nation that bought into major dimensions of the positivist mythos. TV was the fly in the ointment, the window to adult knowledge that could undermine the nation’s strength and moral fiber.

The positivist view of childhood could be maintained only through constant social regulation and surveillance of the young. Since childhood is vulnerable and socially unstable, the control of knowledge becomes especially important in the maintenance of its innocent format. Indeed, in the positivist view childhood no longer exists if the young gain access to certain forms of adult knowledge. No wonder the last half of the twentieth century witnessed so many claims that after TV and other electronic media, childhood was dead. The positivist position has been deemed by many as an elitist perspective, as adults are deemed the trolls of the bridge of childhood. It is adults who decide what children should know and how they should be socialized. The idea that children should be participants in making decisions about their own lives is irrelevant here. Simply put, in the positivist paradigm children are passive entities who must be made to submit to adult decisions about their lives (Spigel, 1998).

Finding a New Paradigm for a New Childhood

With the advent of a plethora of socioeconomic changes, technological developments, globalization, and the perceived inadequacy of the old paradigm, which helps produce profoundly diverse actions and reactions, Western societies and increasingly other parts of the world have entered into a transitional phase of childhood. This transitional phase has been accompanied by a paradigm shift in the way many scholars study childhood and situate it in social, cultural, political, and economic relations. This scholarly shift takes direct exception to the positivist view of childhood and its expression of a universal, uniformly developmen-talist conception of the normal child. This conception of the child as a passive receiver of adult input and socialization strategies has been replaced by a view of the child as an active agent capable of contributing to the construction of his or her own subjectivity. For those operating in the parameters of the new paradigm, the purpose of studying and working with children is not to remove the boundary between childhood and adulthood but to gain a thicker, more compelling picture of the complexity of the culture, politics, and psychology of childhood. With its penchant for decontextualization and inability to account for contemporary social, cultural, political, economic, and epistemological changes, the positivist paradigm is not adequate for this task (Cannella, 1997; Hengst, 2001; Cannella and Kincheloe, 2002; Cannella, 2002; Cook, 2004; Steinberg, 2010).

Insisting that children existed outside society and could be brought in from the cold only by adult socialization that led to development, the positivist view constructed research and childhood professional practices that routinely excluded children’s voices. Advocates of the new paradigm have maintained time and again that such positivist silencing and general disempowerment is not in the best interests of children. In the name of child protection, advocates of the new paradigm have argued, children are often rendered powerless and vulnerable in their everyday lives. As they construct their view of children as active constructors of their own worlds, proponents of the new paradigm work hard to emphasize the per-sonhood of children. The children of the new paradigm both construct their worlds and are constructed by them. Thus, in ethnographic and other forms of new paradigm childhood study, children, like adults, are positioned as co-participants in research—not as mere objects to be observed and categorized. Advocates of the new paradigm operating in the domain of social and educational policy-making for children contend that such activity must always take into account the perspectives of children to inform their understanding of particular situations (Mason and Steadman, 1997; Seaton, 2002; Cook, 2004; Steinberg, 2010).

Thus, central to the new paradigm is the effort to make sure children are intimately involved in shaping their social, psychological, and educational lives. In many ways accomplishing such a task is much easier said than done. In contemporary U.S. society in particular, to attempt it is to expose oneself to ridicule and dismissal by conservative child advocates in diverse social, political, cultural, and educational arenas. Such child-empowerment advocacy is represented by right-wing commentators as a permissive relinquishing of adult power over impudent and disrespectful children (Mason and Steadman, 1997; Ottosen, 2003). Undoubtedly, it will be a difficult struggle to reposition the child in twenty-first-century social relationships. In this context Henry Jenkins argues, as an advocate of the new paradigm, that his work seeks to provide children with tools that facilitate children’s efforts to achieve their own political goals and help them construct their own culture.

In rejecting the positivist paradigm of childhood passivity and innocence, advocates of the new empowerment paradigm are not contending that there is no time when children need adult protection—that would be a silly assertion. Children, like human beings in general, too often find themselves victimized by abuse, neglect, racism, class bias, and sexism. The salient point is that instead of further infantilizing children and rendering them more passive, the new paradigm attempts to employ their perspectives in solving their problems (Mason and Stead-man, 1997). In addition, such transformative researchers and child professionals work to help children develop a critical political consciousness as they protect their access to diverse knowledge and technologies. As is the nature of developing a critical consciousness in any context, we are arguing that children in social, cultural, psychological, and pedagogical contexts need help in developing the ability to analyze, critique, an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• 1 Kinderculture: Mediating, Simulacralizing, and Pathologizing the New Childhood
• 2 Teens and Vampires: From Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Twilights Vampire Lovers
• 3 Is Disney Good for Your Kids? How Corporate Media Shape Youth Identity in the Digital Age
• 4 Selling Subculture: An Examination of Hot Topic
• 5 Queer Eye for the Straight-Acting Guy: The Performance of Masculinity in Gay Youth Culture and Popular Culture
• 6 Fluid: Teen and Youth Identity Construction in Cyberspace
• 7 Tween-Method and the Politics of Studying Kinderculture
• 8 From Miley Merchandising to Pop Princess Peddling: the Hannah Montana Phenomenon
• 9 Corporatizing Sports: Fantasy Leagues, The Athlete as Commodity, and Fans as Consumers
• 10 Hip Hop and Critical Pedagogy: From Tupac to Master P to 50 Cent and Beyond
• 11 Mcdonald’s, Power, and Children: Ronald Mcdonald/Ray Kroc Does it all for you
• 12 The Book of Barbie: After Half a Century, The Bitch Continues to Have Everything
• 13 Home Alone and Bad to the Bone: The Advent of a Postmodern Childhood
• About the Contributors and Editor
• Notes
• Index