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.

As I tell my students as I try to lead them to critical media consumption, my goal is not to make them dislike their pleasures, but to be able to recognize the operation of ideology amidst the candy-coated fun. Thus my pleasure in this show often runs up against its occasional foray into politically-charged representational terrain as gender politics are somewhat an inevitability (perhaps someone else can raise the series’ handling of race and interracial parenthood). I’ve particularly found myself holding my breath as the series tiptoes through the minefield of questions of women and work.

On the surface, legal eagle Julia and her stay-at-home husband may seem the central character pair for these topics, but the series notably offers a range of strategies, choices, and takes on motherhood and work. To the series’ credit, it often “goes there”—into those contentious waters of clearly gendered dilemmas about women’s work, motherhood, and guilt that were a mainstay of a lot of 1980s and 1990s drama. I also get the sense the writers know the complexity of the politics—complexity that most recent depictions of adult women have chosen to simply avoid by uniformly writing characters with highly professionalized careers—but hold my breath because charting a way through remains unclear, whether for television characters or in conversations with moms at the park. Thus, while there have been some missteps this season (why couldn’t Adam have not just supported the idea of Christina going back to work, but pushed back at Christina’s assessment that her children needed her too much “right now” in the final seconds of an episode that did an otherwise brilliant job of depicting the challenges women face re-entering the work force or feeling like their work in the home matters?), I credit the series with providing viewers with a stay-at-home mom and a mom who is trying to find her calling instead of staying in the safe zone of personally troubled but professionally successful women that are have been the new norm.

In many ways, Julia is the prototypic late 20^th century female character as a tough, motivated lawyer who is the sole breadwinner for her husband and grade-school-aged daughter. Yet she is also a generation younger than the women who embodied these dilemmas in the past—instead she grew up appreciating and assuming the benefits of Title IX and gender equity. The fact that the series really hasn’t devoted plot time to debating its stay-at-home father is notable for its normalization. I appreciate that the series doesn’t depict this role reversal as easy; parenthood, in any configuration, isn’t. The multi-generational aspect of the show also offers rich context, with family patriarch Zeke ‘s advice that Crosby tell his girlfriend to give up an out-of-state opportunity wisely going unheeded and no doubt setting up a central problematic for next season.

I’ll use last night’s experience as an example. I have a habit (age be damned) of working furiously on my laptop while most TV shows are on. Usually I only have to “really watch” when a serial drama is on (Lost, Mad Men, Glee), which means I can count on a few hours of work time each night while a DVR’d sitcom runs. So there I am last night, trying to write up a report for my job while my husband pulls up these two shows. And all of a sudden, I find myself having to actually watch the tv screen for three reasons: the acting and dialogue is top notch, calling my attention aurally; the jokes and story points are visually oriented, meaning if I’m not looking I’m not catching the full story; and the situations that gave the genre its moniker are delightfully realistically funny.

On The Middle what grabbed me was a dual storyline about the teenagers: daughter Sue, hopelessly awkward and socially inept, wants a pair of ridiculously priced jeans and her mom caves in; son Axl wants a car (without having to work for it) and his dad says he’ll get him one for the same amount spent on his sister’s jeans. Simple? Beyond doubt. But what charmed me was the timeless universality of the problem: in an era radically different from the one I grew up in, these demands could have easily appeared in the shows I grew up with. But somehow, this all seems different. Perhaps it’s because the Heck family really can’t afford these expenditures and the show actually takes pains to make this a part of the comedy. Perhaps it’s because Frankie’s (the mom’s) voiceovers add poignancy to her purchase of the jeans because she explains her empathy for her daughter’s emotional and psychological need to fit in at school. Maybe it’s because the show reveals a power struggle between the parents over the money spent and the problematic lessons imparted to the kids. Maybe it’s because the kids are deliciously imperfect and selfish and rude in the way that teens can be—and the parents are deliciously stressed, cutting corners with home, family, spouse, and work as they try to make life for their kids as complete as possible.

I had to keep my computer idle as Modern Family whirred on (and also because my husband insisted I had to “see this, see this—look up from your work, you’re missing this”). There is always a lot going on with this multigenerational sitcom, but last night what got me was the comeuppance (of sorts) of new parents Mitchell and Cameron as they attempt to sleep train their infant daughter Lily. (And let me just insert here that I love the fact that my students watch this show!) Mitchell and Cameron are an uber-suburban upper-middle class couple when it comes to their baby—they fall prey to every advice book (in this case Solve Your Child’s Sleep Problems, by Richard Ferber) and every trend in child-rearing you can imagine as they fret over their first child. In an hysterical visual joke, babycam footage (a simple audio baby monitor is no longer sufficient in this country for new parents) reveals Cameron sneaking into baby Lily’s room when she starts crying at 4am, breaking the cardinal Ferber rule of letting your baby “cry it out,” a method Cameron has explained in the show’s documentary style confessional moment that he finds reprehensible. So into the bedroom he goes—and as I watch the actual babycam footage, Mitchell (pro-Ferber) pops up from behind Lily’s crib to shoo his husband back out of the room. As a parent who has had many a late-night argument with my spouse over pretty much exactly this scenario (though we don’t have that babycam—we’re too much like the Heck family financially to swing that) I just about peed my pants. I just have to love the fact that a traditional family sitcom has managed to give me a gay couple to identify with (as opposed to liberally root for). And as with The Middle, I enjoy the representation of parents who don’t always know what they’re doing, and of parents who argue over how best to raise their kids instead of always pleasantly grooving along together.

So three cheers for the return of the family sitcom to TV! These two are fun and have actually made me start to think about what feminism means in lived reality in relation to parenthood and marriage. I don’t have that quite figured out yet…perhaps it has something to do with determining how to attend to the needs and desires of those you love without sacrificing your self-respect and sanity…but in the meantime I intend to ponder this “modern family ” dilemma from the vantage point of being stuck in “the middle” of it all.