A princess (by three-year-old student* with crown drawing help from me).

After my first day in the daycare classroom, I thought I had the kids pegged. Just in the span of an hour, one three-year-old told me all about his Batman pants. A girl wearing a Frozen t-shirt happily informed me of the names Princesses printed onto her front. The pièce de résistance occurred when I drew a copy of a Donald Duck figurine—decked out in his The Three Caballeros poncho and sombrero—and asked the class who it was. “Donald Duck!”In that moment I let my confirmation bias win. It seemed as though gendered merchandizing and Disney market saturation had effectively taken over kids’ media culture. However, with weeks of class time with the kids ahead of me, I had to confront some of my assumptions about kids’ culture and the way we communicate at a young age.

The literature on kids’ media culture is dispersed over disciplines that often fundamentally disagree on the goal of studying young people and the media they interact with. While scholars within our field and outside of it have made key interventions into children’s culture, the focus of popular and academic conversations rests on a binary David Buckingham called protectionist and pedagogical discourses. These two discourses articulate the combination of fear and hope centered on the developing bodies and minds of kids—both the perpetual fear of harm caused by sex and violence and the proactive parent-led curation of educational material to foster “proper” growth.

The problems inherent in this model are numerous—due to classed, gendered, raced, and aged biases—, but the issue I will focus on here is the problem of using an adult bias to talk about kids. I believe that this is a major contributor to the troubling construction of childhood innocence. Speaking from our positions of comparably vast experience, we as adult researchers can underestimate children by assuming that their lack of experience is synonymous with lack of understanding. We also at times see the life of a child as foreign or essentially different than our lives, because of our temporal distance from it. By creating our theses and research questions in isolation from children’s perspectives, we continue to ask questions that center on adults and ignore what children may care about or be interested in.

I’m working on a research initiative led by professor and cartoonist Lynda Barry. The idea is to adapt our research questions for young people (and by young I mean two- to four-year olds) and ask them to weigh in on our questions through drawing. As I mentioned before, the class I visit once a week is made up of two- and three-year olds, an age I find especially fascinating for two reasons. First, because this age group is often ignored by psychological research methods that hinge on repeatable tasks. Apparently toddlers do not typically repeat tasks when ordered (this will come as a huge surprise to parents and caregivers, I’m sure). Second is because they are at the beginning of Disney’s supposed princess target audience (girls age two to six). This “princess obsession” is a loaded one since positive and negative associations with hyper-femininity range across class and taste cultures. With both of the above reasons in mind, I am in the process of crafting research questions and methods with the help of my co-researchers. At this point I hope to share a couple brief observations about creating and interacting with toddlers in a space when they are among their peer group and with adults.

1: Dialogue is generative 

One of Buckingham’s observations is that we can’t take kids’ words at face value. I think we could often say the same for adults, but it is useful to remember that young children do not always have enough experience to know how we want them to respond to specific questions. Our research objective in the classrooms was to get kids to draw and tell us stories about their drawings. What I discovered was that this age group isn’t fond of or especially equipped to synthesizing visual information into stories. When I ask the innocent question “Will you tell me what you drew?” I’d mostly get frank and negative responses, either “I don’t want to,” “No,” or “I don’t know.” I found it much easier to talk with them while they drew. The “stories” were more like conversations, occurring between myself and a child or two. Dialogue moves beyond verbal communication as well. Thanks to Lynda Barry’s insights, my (adult) colleagues and I discovered that discussion through drawing and playing created more insights from kids than standing at the borders and observing.

2: Repetition helps with creation 

Kids* repeating each other’s drawing ideas. Top: “I’m drawing purple and a rainbow.” Bottom: “I’m starting a rainbow.”

Again, I’ve interacted with toddlers one-on-one, but I was surprised to see how much kids will repeat each other while making things. Often I’d get one kid drawing a “horse” that looked more like squiggle marks and then another kid who didn’t know what to draw would suddenly chime in, “I’m drawing a horse.” This helped me learn how to initiate a drawing session by simply stating what I was drawing and see if anyone else would start drawing the same object. At this stage of practice and motor skills, the kids’ ability to create “realistic” images varied wildly, but by saying they were creating the same thing as a friend, they were able to create something.

So, what do we do with experiences like these? I don’t expect these interactions to write my papers for me or even craft my research questions in a direct way. My hope is that if scholars communicate with children through interactive research methods, we may be able to move beyond thinking about what media culture does to kids, and move toward questions and methodologies that respect kids’ media and cultural engagement as nuanced, active, and social.

*Note: drawings are recreations by the author due to IRB restrictions on circulation of original pieces.

1. China had a big box office year in 2012, though a good chunk of the revenue came from American studio imports, like Life of Pi. The Hangover-esque Chinese comedy Lost in Thailand has become the country’s biggest domestic hit ever, though, and some expect the rise of China to global number one movie market status to come courtesy of shallow blockbusters.

2. Hollywood studios are turning to outside funding to support its films that aren’t shallow blockbusters, while Disney is looking at budget cuts for everything. DreamWorks is still a great place to work, though. Video game makers want greater control over the films Hollywood makes from their properties, while Disney is meshing together gaming and its movies with the upcoming Disney Infinity game.

3. We’re getting more info about Redbox Instant, which is expected to launch in March, because a group of users have gotten to beta test it. We know that it will be focused on movies, not TV shows, and Redbox’s CEO also says the company won’t abandon DVDs. But Austin Carr isn’t impressed with the service.

4. Home video revenue finally rose a bit last year, halting a seven-year skid, with streaming getting most of the credit for the uptick. UltraViolet also continues to grow, and Walmart’s “disc to digital” cloud service has been improved. Don’t expect Amazon to extend its “Amazon-purchased CD to digital” plan to movies, though.

5. Amazon has also launched a new mp3 store targeted toward iPhone/iPod users, offering a shot across iTunes’ bow. iTunes now has a partnership with Rolling Stone, whose iPad magazine will have links to Apple’s music store. The blog Asymco has graphed the iTunes economy.

6. 2012 music sales indicate the CD’s impending demise and the digital single’s growth. Other trends revealed from the figures are that big hits take up an increasing share of download sales; rock and pop music dominated, though country music sales rose compared to 2011; and indie labels grabbed one-third of album sales.

7. The number of children reading books on digital devices is rising, though over half of kids still have never read an e-book. Libraries are also said to be losing their influence among children, but maybe video games at libraries can help. There’s also a plan in the works in Texas for a bookless, all-digital library.

8. The Wii U is bringing in more revenue than the original Wii did in early sales, but that’s only because it costs more. Nintendo’s president says sales of the Wii U are “not bad,” given the competitive landscape, and Nintendo is merging its console and handheld divisions to better deal with that landscape. Xbox 360 has finished its second year as the best-selling console, and Microsoft says that the next Xbox system will fill your living room with images to immerse you in games. And we can now say goodbye to the dominant console of the past, the Playstation 2, which will no longer be made.

9. Pingdom offers a slew of stats on how we used the internet around the world in 2012, from search to mobile to email, while Mashable has an infographic specifically on social media use in 2012. The FCC is looking to expand Wi-Fi spectrum space so we can do even more online in 2013, like look at video ads.

10. Some of the finer News for TV Majors posts from the past few weeks: Anger Management Returns, CNN-SI Change, OWN Hopes, Double Your FX, TCA & Twitter, The Killing Will Return, Dish & CBS Battle Ropes in CNET, Corrie Coming to Hulu, Five-0 Ending, Time-Shifted Viewing, Soap Revivals, Video Sharing Passed, Netflix & Ratings, Al Jazeera America, PBS at TCA, The CW at TCA, CBS & Showtime at TCA, Arrested Development at TCA, ABC at TCA, FX at TCA, Fox at TCA, NBC at TCA.

Michelle Obama and Robert Iger jointly announce Disney's nutritional initiatives. Photo: AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta

Disney recently announced new, stricter standards for food and beverage products advertised on its youth-centered TV channels, radio stations, and websites. Disney revealed its new initiatives in a Washington D.C. press conference alongside First Lady Michelle Obama, who’s been campaigning for healthier eating habits since her move to the White House.

The announcement builds on other healthy-eating initiatives by the Mouse House, including a 2006 effort to curtail its character licensing on products high in sugar, salt or fat, ending the partnership with McDonalds that pulled Toy Story characters from Happy Meals. Disney’s latest nutrition standards mean that companies wishing to advertise on certain Disney-owned outlets will have to adhere to stricter limits on calories, sugars, and saturated fat in their products. Popular products like Lunchables and CapriSun wouldn’t make the cut for commercial time under the new criteria. Michelle Obama praised Disney’s move as significant change in the children’s media business, calling it a “game-changer” for childhood obesity in the U.S.: “…for years people told us that no matter what we did to get our kids to eat well and exercise, we would never solve our childhood obesity crisis until companies changed the way that they sell food to our children. We all know the conventional wisdom about that… today, Disney has turned that conventional wisdom on its head.”

Indeed, the move by Disney can be read as significant to children’s media culture. The food and beverage industry has long been the leading advertiser in kids’ TV, dating back to the earliest days of the medium–even before “children’s television” became synonymous with Saturday morning cartoons. Although the new criteria doesn’t go into effect until 2015 (because of existing agreements and contracts, per Disney), any pledge to turn away advertiser’s money in our commercial system is notable, especially from a the particular industry that’s historically been the bread-and-butter of kids’ television.

Disney, however, is in a particularly privileged position to launch such a program because of its diversified yet highly integrated business models. Unlike Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, or The Hub, Disney’s flagship kids channel isn’t ad-supported in the traditional sense (a holdover from its early days as a premium cable channel, where pricey subscription fees form most of the channel’s revenue). Ad-research firm Kanter Media estimated that spending for food and beverage products on Disney-owned children’s programming (on cable and ABC) totaled $7.2 million in 2011. But that figure is less than one-tenth of one percent of Disney’s total annual advertising sales ($7.6 billion across its networks in 2011); the figure becomes even less significant when you consider that all those ad sales make up less than half of the total $18.7 billion in revenue generated by Disney-owned Media Networks in 2011. Annual income from affiliate and subscriber fees ($8.8 billion) and sales/distribution of programming around the world ($2.3 billion) form the bulk of Disney Media Networks’ revenue, according to its 2011 annual report (p. 30). Still, though, this move by Disney may have larger, reverberating effects in the kids’ TV biz as a whole – the publicity Disney’s receiving for “banning junk food advertising” may force other channels/networks that are more ad-dependent to adopt similar restrictions on products advertised in kids’ media culture.

The "Mickey Check" logo indicates food that meets Disney's nutrition standards

But what’s getting less attention is perhaps the most interesting part of Disney’s announcement: the launch of the new “Mickey Check” logo. Products that meet Disney’s new health criteria are not only eligible to air their advertising on Disney’s outlets, but are also eligible to bear the “Mickey Check” logo on their consumer packaging. According to the White House press release, by the end of 2012, “the Mickey Check will appear on licensed foods products, on qualified recipes on Disney.com and Family.com, and on menus and select products at Disney’s Parks and Resorts.”

By appearing to limit food ads to kids with it’s new criteria, the Mouse House is on one hand “taking a stand” and “turning the conventional wisdom of selling food to our children on its head,” to use Michelle Obama’s words. On the other hand, putting a Mickey logo on food products sold via Disney outlets upholds some of the oldest conventions of marketing to kids. Using familiar characters or logos from kids’ favorite media to sell consumer goods is the oldest trick in the book; in fact, a form of this tactic (known as host-selling) was at one time banned by the FCC on television aimed at children. The green check mark and/or the phrase “good for you–and fun too!” hardly do anything to diminish the dominance of the familiar Mickey shape and Disney-lettered logo in the top left; one hardly has to stretch the imagination to see a child in a grocery cart excitedly ask their parents for “Mickey snacks,” regardless of the product. After all, by the age of two most children become quite skilled at brand recognition and logo identification, and struggle to understand the selling intent of commercials and branded merchandise well into their middle-school years (see Kunkel, 1987; Valkenburg & Cantor, 2001).

The potential loss of advertising sales by the “banned” products seems far less risky (and admirable) when you consider the revenue possibilities of licensing the “Mickey Check” to products that do meet their criteria (especially if the Mickey Check becomes an add-on used to up-sell marketers on advertising time with Disney). At best, the new Mickey Check licensing is an obvious attempt to monetize the pseudo-goodwill of this announcement and extend the Disney brand; at worst, it’s a conscious continuation of marketing practices that exploit children’s cognitive development process of becoming educated consumers. Perhaps Robert Iger’s comments to The New York Times sum it up best: “companies in a position to help with solutions to childhood obesity should do just that,” but, he added, “this is not altruistic. This is about smart business.”

On the one hand…
It’s a tween girl kicking ass. Hit Girl adds a welcome complication to a representation category full of kid sister supporting roles, pop star princesses, and mallrat mean girls. Disney executives once referred to Hannah Montana as their version of

"I can't see through walls, but I can kick your ass."

a super hero for girls; someone who was normal by day but extraordinary by night. Hit Girl is in so many ways a much cooler female superhero. Why should boys be the only ones for whom “superhero” means physical action and beating up bad guys?  Clearly Hit Girl isn’t necessarily meant for young girls, given her language and the film’s R rating (among other things),  but Hit Girl is definitely in the running to become my favorite tween. Sill, the comments section on sites like Cinematical or FirstShowing.net that debuted the Hit Girl trailer in December are filled with people claiming they “can’t wait to take their daughter to see it.” So , Kick-Ass might have the potential for cool father-(older) daughter time in certain families.  In addition, though, I also kind of like that it plays with notions of an idealized childhood and grays the line between ‘adult’ and ‘child’ in entertainment. Some critics have already come out to sound the alarm about blurring these lines, raising the familiar concern about  kids and violence in media, but to me, that points to our increased tendency to think that if a media text features a child of any kind, we often automatically think it should be child- or family-friendly fare, and should thus be safely contained in carefully constructed norms of saccharine representations and prosocial narratives. But the irony and shock factor in the image of a foul-mouthed tween girl assassin can be fun for adults, and that’s part of the appeal.

On the other hand…
While watching a fictional 12 year-old girl cussing and killing villains can be ironic and fun in destabilizing the innocence of childhood, I’m troubled as to larger questions of what we may or may not gain from destabilizing it and our privilege to do so. Hit Girl feels awesome because she’s a young, white middle-class girl in America, a group often pressured to be pure, innocent, and powerless. But in other parts of the world, kids with guns are a truly distressed class of child soldiers, where the loss of childhood innocence is a serious tragedy.

Additionally, I’m troubled by the fact that there are certainly some serious dangers of exploitation in Hit Girl. The slow motion action shots focus our gaze on her body, which is also the real-life body of a 12-year-old actress, Chloe Moretz. There are similar struggles in other female action heroes, like Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft, or Halle Berry as Catwoman, and there are many young (looking) girls in comics and anime who don’t wear much and kill things.  But as a live action movie with a real 12-year-old actress, I find it much more problematic, and I’m wrestling with identifying and articulating reasons why, beyond just the seemingly obvious “she’s young, female and vulnerable.”  Is it because she’s young and supposedly without the sexuality that Angelina or Halle might command and thus enjoy in those characters? It’s certainly unsettling to think about the target audience of 18 – 34-year-old men gazing at Moretz and the uneven power dynamic at play there. In the trailer, we see her in a colorful wig and purple super hero suit, but she also appears in the film in the classic plaid skirt schoolgirl outfit, which by now is practically shorthand for fetishized young girl. I don’t want to say that she is already necessarily a victim, though, because denying the burgeoning sexuality of t(w)een girls is itself a problem that creates troublesome double standards and neurotic expectations for young women. That said, the fetishization of the young female body for display in Kick-Ass is undeniably exploitative. (I mean, really. The school-girl outfit? Ugh.)

So, I’m troubled by the potential exploitation in Hit Girl. At the same time, there are ways that she works against our cultural notions of kids as innocent and girls as passive victims. And that’s definitely fun. In the end, I don’t think either take can necessarily win out over another; after all, there’s no such thing as a perfect representation. But I’m fascinated by Hit Girl and what we can learn about childhood and gender in working through our reactions to this character.