The Tweening of America: The Disappearance of Age-Appropriate Television
by David J. Leonard | NewBlackMan
What started as an ordinary conversation about marriage between my partner and our 7 ½ year old daughter (Rea) concretized our ongoing frustrations and precarious relationship with popular culture. Following a role-playing game that ended in a pretend marriage between Rea and Sam (our son, who will be four next month), my partner asked Sam if he knew what marriage meant. Unsure, Rea intervened with a very elaborate description that went something like this: it is when two people meet and then start to date. If they like each other, they continue to date for a while until they are ready to get married. At the wedding, the promise to follow the rules for married people. While her description actually encompassed a few more details, it was clear that she not only understands dating, relationships, and courting rituals, but the institution of marriage and the associated vows. At the age of 7 ½ , she is well versed in both the fairy-tale and happily-ever-after narratives of marriage.
Over the last year, my partner and I have struggled to help Rea find age-appropriate, and most importantly, empowering television shows. In her mind, she is too mature and grown-up for those preschool/kindergarten shows. You know that ones that emphasize language skills, inter-personal skill development, symbolic reason, and cultural literacy: Sesame Street, Arthur, Sid the Science Kid, Word Girl, and Martha Speaks. In her estimation, these shows are neither cool nor sophisticated enough for her; her brother yes, but definitely not for a 2nd grader. Simply put, those shows are boring and, worse, beneath her. Instead, she would much rather watch shows like ICarly, Victorious, Hannah Montana, Wizards of Waverly Place, Good Luck Charlie, or countless other tween shows.
According to Gary Marsh, a top executive at Disney Channels Worldwide: “It's always been presumed that animation is the gravy train. Nobody quite understood you could create lifestyle franchises out of live-action tween shows." Similarly, Peter Larsen, in “TV’s Tween Scene,” describes this cultural shift as not only economically significant but culturally important as well: “What they discovered was that kids in that age range didn't want to watch shows for little kids, and didn't want to watch their parents' shows. Instead, they wanted to see themselves and their stories on TV.”
While trying to attract the 9-14 age consumers (25 million in the United States, representing a 50 billion dollar industry), tween shows universally tell stories of TEENAGERS. ICarly chronicles the trials and tribulations of Carly Shay and friends, now in high school, who have their own webcast. One Nickelodeon executive identified the show as one about “relationships and humor” a fact that illustrated by a list of Carly’s “boyfriends, dates and crushes” on one website. Victorious similarly follows high school kids at a performing art school in Hollywood, CA. It, like just about every other show, explores the issues of relationships, getting-in-trouble, boyfriends and girlfriends. While focusing on the experiences and stories of 13-16 year olds, the dearth of shows dealing with the experiences of 6-10 year old kids, along with marketing efforts directed at these younger consumers, results in gravitation to shows that are more teen than tween.
Our discomfort with her watching shows that focus on dating, boys and materialism, looking beautiful and being cool isn’t simply about age appropriateness and our desire for her to define her identity and otherwise imagine her own childhood outside of teenager themes and issues. The focus on dating sends a message that coolness and acceptance comes for girls who have a boyfriend, who guys think are attractive, and who has been kissed. Likewise, too much of these shows chronicle the struggles of girls to be accepted, to feel good about themselves, and part of this comes from the struggles to get a boyfriend.
According to a 2009 study from True Child, school-age television shows lag significantly behind preschool shows in terms of offering representation of confident and self-aware girls. Compared to 94% of preschool shows, only 42% of shows geared toward school-age kids like my daughter exhibit characteristics like confidence, assertiveness, and high-self esteem. Similarly, the report found that “49% of shows feature at “82% of shows feature girls primarily with long hair”; “60% of the shows feature girls who are underweight with skinner than average waists.”
The questionable messages about consumerism, gendered-identity, and appearance-determined coolness run against the presented image of the Disney and Nickelodeon shows about girl power. As example, True Child celebrated several tween girl shows for “breaking through gender stereotypes.” Similarly, David Bushman argues the importance these shows in giving girls something to watch that indeed is about confident girls:
I think Nickelodeon has empowered kids in a lot of ways … but I think they’ve specifically empowered young girls, and that’s a really important thing that Nickelodeon deserves a lot of credit for. This whole idea that you could not make girl-centric shows because boys wouldn’t watch them, they disproved that theory (in Banet-Weiser).
Yet, visibility and even challenging stereotypes isn’t the only issue to consider when examining these shows. Visibility doesn’t generate empowerment; visibility isn’t by definition empowering.
“Third Wave feminism (or sometimes “Girlie feminism”) embraces commercial media visibility and enthusiastically celebrates the power that comes with it,” writes Sarah Banet-Weiser. “In this way, Third Wave feminism situates issues of gender within commercial and popular culture, and insistently positions Third Wave feminist politics as not only fundamentally different from Second Wave feminist politics, but because of the embrace of media visibility and the commercial world, as also more representative for a new generation of women.” The celebration of these shows, against a backdrop of hyper consumerism, hyper materialism, and an over-emphasis on an appearance, relationships, and coolness, illustrates the problematic nature of “girlie feminism” in the context of popular commodity culture.
The source of empowerment and collective identity that results from these shows isn’t driven from political, cultural or social power, but the power of visibility and the market. This doesn’t result in individual or collective power. Susan Douglas, in Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media notes, “Once this sense of generational collectivity as a market evaporates, so does the sense of political collectivity.” In generating individual identities tied to consumerism, material consumption, personal choice, and being attached, these shows are promoting a different sort of power for future generations.
To be clear, our struggles with tween shows isn’t just about whether or not a 7 ½-year should watch shows that often deal with dating, relationships, and other high-school themes. Her expertise in dating and marriage illustrates the power in these shows, and the messages she is receiving, all of which is leading her to think more and more about relationships and the importance of her appearance. For appearance and having a boyfriend are constructed as the core elements of cool within these shows.
While that is certainly an issue at the moment, hoping that she will see her identity outside of being attached and having the right clothes, these concerns and criticism about the consumer message transcend the moment. When she is 10, 12, 14, and so on, we will remain vigilant in challenging these messages and pushing her to think critically about the media world she lives within.
On a regular basis, I ask my daughter questions, challenging her to think about the pedagogical messages transmitted on television and in the broader popular culture. I ask her why so many female characters, otherwise talented as students, artists, and athletes, spend so much time within these show trying to attract the attention of boys. I ask her why these “free-spirited” individuals seem so focused on fitting, on being cool, and otherwise acting like everyone else. I ask her why she thinks these shows go to great lengths to encourage her to want things either because of the products they have or because of the endless show-related stuff for sale. Just this week, in regards to this article, we were talking about the lessons learned from these shows. In response to my comments about consumerism, she offered the following: “But I like to shop. I like to look at things.”
Me: You don’t like to shop, you like to buy
Rea: Yes, I like to buy
Me: Why?
Rea: Because I like to get things
Me: Why?
Rea: because I like to have things?
Me: Why?
Rea: How many whys are you going to ask me?
Pushing her to think about learned consumerism, and how popular culture defines her primary role as a citizen to be both a consumer and a girlfriend/wife is difficult given the ways in which tween shows link both to acceptability and coolness. Challenging her to think about why being attractive, having to have a boyfriend, the right clothes/shoes/ jewelry is so often tied to her identity as girl is not easy.
Yet, the importance of pushing back, challenging the heteronormative patriarchy lessons emanating from these shows, all while questioning the idea that power comes from visibility, is clear. “Young girls – our daughters, our nieces, our friends kids – need to learn how to talk back to the media at ever younger ages,” writes Susan Douglas in The Rise of Enlightened Sexism: How Pop Culture took us from Girl Power to Girls Gone Wild. “Talking back to the media may seem inconsequential or fruitless – and indeed, it only has a limited effect in bringing about change – but look at some of the great stuff we get to see now that we never saw in, say, 1985. But that’s not the points – it’s not necessarily about them, it’s about us, and changing what we can imagine.” We are working hard so that Rea is able to imagine a world beyond the tween world commonplace on television. We are working hard to help her see herself beyond the constructed reality of America’s tween television fantasies.
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David J. Leonard is Associate Professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender and Race Studies at Washington State University, Pullman. He has written on sport, video games, film, and social movements, appearing in both popular and academic mediums. His work explores the political economy of popular culture, examining the interplay between racism, state violence, and popular representations through contextual, textual, and subtextual analysis. He is the author of Screens Fade to Black: Contemporary African American Cinema and the forthcoming After Artest: Race and the War on Hoop (SUNY Press). Leonard is a regular contributor to NewBlackMan and blogs @ No Tsuris.
