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.

The choice to target the same child and tween demographic that BMW once attracted, rather than the nostalgic millennial audience, is a smart and unsurprising choice for the Disney Channel. The swapping out of “boy” for “girl,” however, is a far greater change than the generational shift, and it is gender that truly separates the spin-off from its parent program. Unfortunately, from a feminist perspective, the execution of these gendered differences leaves much to be desired.

In BMW, protagonist Cory was the straitlaced, middle-class kid from a nuclear family; his best friend, Shawn, was the cocky daredevil from the trailer park. That dichotomy is replicated here in Riley and BFF Maya, but it’s not just Maya’s AC/DC t-shirt and refusal to do homework that mark her rebellion–it’s her sexuality. While Riley is barely starting to experiment with lip gloss, “cool” adult women in the subway remind Maya about the importance of walking provocatively. While Maya is willing to seduce a strange boy on the train as a game, Riley is left terrified and babbling when she trips and falls into the same boy’s lap.

The contrasts come up again and again in this middle school virgin/whore morality play, a theme made explicit when class nerd Farkle walks into the cafeteria with a slice each of angel food and devil’s food cake. And while Maya is never specifically reprimanded for the sexualized aspects of her behavior, the moral of the pilot is that Riley should “be herself” and keep her best friend out of trouble, not try to become her. The girl from the wrong side of the tracks is allowed to be the “whore” in need of saving, but Cory and Topanga’s baby girl must remain pure.

Aside from the virgin/whore themes, Farkle is the show’s biggest problem. His BMW counterpart was Minkus, the obnoxiously nerdy thorn in Cory and Shawn’s sides. But because Minkus was a boy on a heteronormative TV show, his annoying behavior toward the protagonists never veered into sexual territory. If Farkle’s archetype had been gender-flipped the same way Riley’s and Maya’s were, perhaps the character could have worked. Instead, viewers are treated to a character whose defining characteristic is his repeated and unproblematized sexual harassment of the main characters.

Then there’s the third problem: Cory himself, whose reaction to Riley’s interaction with boys is not so much paternal as paternalistic. When Riley is interested in a boy, Cory physically carries that boy out of the room. Yet when Farkle literally takes over Cory’s history class to rhapsodize on his “love” for both Riley and Maya, an affection the girls visibly do not share, Cory lets it proceed without complaint. As the parental and academic voice of reason and the primary nostalgic connection to the previous show (Topanga, sadly, has almost nothing to do in this pilot), Cory’s behavior is unconscionable; in just 22 minutes, he manages to deny his daughter sexual agency in two completely different ways.

BMW always had romantic elements; the characters who would become Riley’s parents first kissed in the fourth episode of season one. Yet the romance was never as all-encompassing in the pre-high school seasons as it is in GMW’s pilot, and it wasn’t confused with sexual harassment or the paternalistic determination of acceptable female sexual expression. In fact, one of BMW’s most triumphant episodes is season four’s “Chick Like Me,” in which Shawn and Cory pose as women and learn hard lessons about the kind of harassment women and girls deal with daily.

The change, however, is not surprising. BMW premiered at a time when “girl shows” were few and far between; most American children’s programming circa 1993 featured a male protagonist or a mixed-gender ensemble. The few girl-centric live-action shows that did exist, like Clarissa Explains it All, were in many ways feminist reactions against these boy-centric narratives. But in the two decades since, Disney and Nickelodeon have produced a slew of sitcoms with tween girl protagonists, creating the mold into which GMW is expected to fit itself.

This balancing of genders in children’s programming is a welcome step forward, but there are crevices of that mold that would be better left unfilled – like the prominent use of sexual harassment as humor in shows like Hannah Montana and iCarly. Though these problematic themes are by no means new (Steve Urkel from Family Matters and Roger from Sister, Sister existed contemporaneously with BMW), they have become codified elements of the tween girl sitcom as it exists today, and GMW is following that code.

Many of the elements that made BMW so charming are still present in GMW: tweens figuring out their place in the world, devoted best friends with opposite personalities, and the thematic tying together of school lessons and life lessons. I applaud the creators for bringing those tropes into an explicitly female space. But Girl Meets World is also burdened by the normalized sexism found in girls’ programming of the past two decades, and that may prove to be its creative and political downfall.