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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 makes the key claim that Western modernity witnesses an ongoing co-construction of mass media, childhood, and youth that addresses basis dilemmas brought about by ideological dynamisms of modernity. The claim is underpinned by a time-based analysis of two sets of co-construction discourses. The first set hones in on mundane, mediated images of childhood, for example through print news reporting, advertisements, television, film, and social media; and the second set focuses on media panics which are intermittent and short-lived public outbursts of celebration or concern spurred by the uptake of a new medium. The chapter documents that the entanglement of media and childhood indirectly serves to re-imagine dilemmas of Western modernity in three ways: They address similar and fundamental social regulation strategies with respect to shifting power relations of age, gender, class, and ethnicity. They address the same cultural issues to do with changes in taste and quality. Last, but not least, they address the same issues to do with the implications of mediated interaction and its changes.
Debbie Olson and the late Giselle Rampaul argue that childhood is, and always has been, an unstable concept, variously interpreted and represented according to historical, social, cultural, political, and economic contexts. Such visual representations of children established a standard for what children were expected to look like and contributed to certain idealized conceptions of childhood, most notably the idea of childhood innocence. But childhood innocence has proved to be as fluid as the notion of childhood itself. Images of children today across all types of visual media demonstrate an ideological shift as they often present children as knowing, adultified, and sometimes menacing. This chapter explains how representations of children and childhood are historically and culturally situated, reflecting both local and global notions of what childhood is through various visual landscapes.
Marina Krcmar focuses more specifically in this chapter on the inherent assumptions of the research on children and media. She considers four different assumptions that bear identification and consideration as we construct our research going forward. The first assumption is that children and adolescents are qualitatively different from adults, an assumption strongly held although historically recent. Second, age is taken as a primary variable. Although it may be a self-evident and necessary assumption when considering development, it should not be held up as interdependent from other variables. The third assumption is that all differences are related to development, again, a possibly problematic assumption that she argues, should be included in research conceptualization and in theory building. Fourth, researchers have selectively applied only certain kinds of development (e.g., cognitive) while leaving out others. For example, with the advent of tablets, physical development may be a necessary factor to consider when in the past, it has not been. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the importance of children's environment when studying media and the importance of considering and measuring the Covid-19 pandemic as it relates to children and families in future research in this area.
Uwe Hasebrink and Ingrid Paus-Hasebrink discuss how changes in media environments and in children's practices of use, lead to changes of childhood and socialization and in the development of their view of the world. The chapter deals with children's media consumption and how it changes over time. It focuses on long-term trends in children's media use and this mainly with a look at function rather than technology. Therefore, it takes the most relevant forms of media use – reading, listening to audio content, watching audio-visual content, gaming, and digital communication – and describes which media children have used in order to realize the respective functions. In addition, against today's backdrop of an increasingly converging media environment, the chapter takes a more holistic view on children's media use and discusses trends in children's cross-media practices. Finally, the authors discuss consequences of the trends in children's media use with regard to social and political implications.
David Buckingham and Rebekah Willett analyze how children are constructed as consumers by a range of stakeholders, including marketers, campaigners, and academics from different disciplines. Given the increase in children's digital activities on personal electronic devices as well as more sophisticated forms of data collection and analysis by online companies, there are growing concerns about datafication and new forms of marketing that are targeting children more directly. The chapter reveals the ways research and debates position children in largely polarized ways, as passive victims of marketing or as active and “empowered” consumers. The chapter explores how these debates play out in academic research in relation to media effects and consumer socialization theories and includes critiques of these traditions. The authors present alternative approaches to studying children as consumers, by taking account of the social contexts of their practices. Specifically, the chapter describes research that employs theories from cultural studies, actor-network theory, and the anthropology of consumer culture. The chapter argues for more nuanced approaches which move beyond polarized constructions of children as consumers.
Dafna Lemish offers a variant of a critical approach to scholarship by the extension of feminist theories to the study of children and media. I argue 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. In countering common critiques of this approach, I argue that feminist theorists could be considered ideological, but only in the sense that they stress human equality and the right of every child (regardless of gender, race, geographical location, disability or any other determinants of human conditions) to realize their full potential.
Divya McMillan argues that TikTok, K-pop, and digital television, all peaking during the COVID-19 pandemic, offer scholars of children and youth media, the opportunity to pursue new lines of inquiry in global media culture and childhood, and strengthen the integration of research across broadcast media and digital technologies in the era of globalization. This chapter uses the current moment of user generated media and direct-to-fan strategies of synergistic global partnerships to provide a sweeping assessment of dominant approaches and urge new directions in the field. The chapter reiterates the importance of grounded study to understand active entanglements of youth, strategic interconnectedness of their multiple modalities of media engagement, soft and hard skills in content production and delivery, use of peers as experts, and influence of peers in content creation, framing, and integration. The author argues that explorations of subjective agency, of inscribed consumer-producer positions across broadcast and digital platforms, should be extended to empirical analyses of how networks of trust are formed, how risks to privacy and self are assessed, how defense mechanisms are constructed and deployed, and how peer experts are constituted.
Bringing this part of the handbook to a closure, Liam Berriman suggests that the growth of research interest in children and media has run in parallel with the development of a “new” interdisciplinary social study of childhood. This emerging field of interdisciplinary childhood studies has been highly influential in how we theorize and research children's relationships with media. This has included providing conceptual tools for understanding how moral panics of children and media emerge around notions of childhood innocence, and how children can be seen as agentic in their engagement with media as part of their everyday lives. This chapter looks back at the relationship between childhood studies and the study of children and media over multiple decades – charting key theoretical and conceptual contributions, but also points of tension and conceptual difference.
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Charting ways in which mass media represent children and ways in which the media orchestrate claims about children's uses of new media offers analytical prisms through which we may address wider societal discourses of, and contestations over, what counts as proper media and proper childhood and youth. Such discourses are powerful frames within which children's actual media practices play out, and the discourses are therefore important to understand if we want a full insight into children's relations to media. My key claim, which I will substantiate in the following, is that Western modernity witnesses an ongoing co-construction of mass media, childhood, and youth that addresses basis dilemmas of modernity and late modernity. Media are at once material and symbolic social resources (Carey, [1989]1992) whose main characteristic is their semiotic properties. So, media are not merely conduits for the transmission of information, they are institutionally embedded meaning-making tools that connect people across time and space (Thompson, 1995). So, media serve as important keys to public re-imaginings and re-calibrations of what is means to “come into being” in modernity.
The nexus between media and childhood may be seen to operate along a continuum of positions. The chapter focuses on two poles in that continuum. First, on a day-to-day basis media serve as an important public means of articulating selective images of childhood, for example through print news reporting, advertisements, television, film, and social media. I discuss how these popular mediated perceptions are articulated and may be understood. Second, notably with the uptake of a new medium, media may concentrate on certain aspects of children's media uses, and such interest may develop into what may be termed a media panic (Drotner, 1992). Positions within the two poles shift over time as the empirical contexts within which they operate change. But the two poles also share important similarities to do with the structural issues they tackle, issues that the chapter will spell out.
My focus is on media discourses that are both public and popular by which I mean discourses promulgated through media that are publicly accessible and have a wide circulation and use. Conversely, I have nothing to say about children's responses to media nor their actual media practices. Since demarcations between childhood and youth change over time, I include examples of adolescence or youth when they are deemed relevant, although my main interest is with articulations of childhood; and while media serve as public arenas of debates on childhood in relation to, for example, education, work and leisure, I focus my analysis on those aspects of the nexus where the media operate directly as means or ends of childhood perceptions. Last, but not least, my account is a partial one, limited to the Global North and its specific empirical constellations between media and childhood development that may have little relevance to other parts ...
