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This review by Reg Bailey, Chief Executive of Mothers' Union expresses the concerns at the commercialisation and sexualisation of childhood. We are all living in an increasingly sexual and sexualised culture and many parents feel that his culture is often inappropriate for their children. This leaves many feeling that children are being encouraged to grow up too quickly and that we don't allow them to be children. This is compounded in some new media where there is limited regulation. The review makes 14 recommendations covering 4 themes. The aims of these being: i) that sexualised images used in public places and on television, the internet, music videos and other places are more in line wi...
This book explores the impact of digital media on young children’s lives and the role that the media and news industries play in the social construction of childhood. It highlights the pressing issues relating to young children’s media use drawing on key research and examines the impact of digital media on their learning, development and socialization. The chapters recognise the challenges digital media presents children and families, but also demonstrate how media use and engagement can have a positive impact on children’s academic attainment, social capital and opportunities to create and curate online content. Covering key areas of concern such as safety, violence and children’s m...
Children are significant consumers of services such as health, welfare, educational institutions and the environment. Alongside this, the marketization of childhood means that children are exposed to advertising and marketing through a wide range of media on a daily basis. Examining key debates on children’s power, status and citizenship issues, it considers the wider implications of how consumerism impacts on children‘s health, well-being and life chances. This timely book explores childhood and consumerism through four key strands: children as consumers of services; children as consumers of space; the link between citizenship and consumption; the influences of the marketization of childhood. Rethinking Children as Consumers will be essential reading for students, researchers, practitioners and policy makers who are interested in the topic of consumerism across early childhood, childhood, youth and society.
This volume presents a ground-breaking collection of interdisciplinary chapters from international scholars which complicate, and offers new ways to make sense of, children's sexual cultures across complex political, social and cultural terrains.
Childhood today is big business. It is impossible for any child growing up to avoid intense marketing and research shows that these commercial pressures affect children's health and wellbeing. Featuring high profile contributors with hard-hitting views, this book argues that these corporate and commercial pressures are new forms of child abuse.
This book provides a critical examination of the discourses that underpin the regulation of children’s access to certain knowledge – understood as ‘difficult knowledge’ – and highlights the way this regulation contributes to the construction of childhood, to children’s vulnerability, to broader social relationships (including adult-child relations of power), and to the constitution of the ‘good’ future citizen in developed countries. Through this analysis, the author critically engages with the relationships between childhood, innocence, moral panic, censorship and notions of citizenship. She argues that the regulation of children’s access to particular knowledge largely st...
Providing extensive examples of the conditions of children's everyday consumption as well as how children themselves understand issues of work, money, scarcity, and consumer products, this book challenges the prevailing theories of consumption and opens up new ways of thinking about children. Arguing that consumption simultaneously reflects on the changing social role of children, family relations, market interaction, and state regulations, this account marries consumer studies with perspectives that emanate from the disciplines of childhood sociology and the history of childhood. With contributions from novice and established researchers, it generates consumer values no longer based on the idea of the naïve or competent child.
Growing up in an increasingly media-saturated, commercial, and globalized world, children and young people in contemporary society encounter and must creatively adapt to a range of cultural phenomena. Offering a critical introduction to childhood in the digital age, Children and Young People's Cultural Worlds challenges common concepts and concerns about childhood innocence held by many adults. It examines the diversity of childhood experiences and relationships--the distinctiveness of children's worlds--and explores topics such as the consequences of age and the experience of living in different cultural contexts. Utilizing contributions from scholars in a variety of different fields, it is interdisciplinary and international in scope. Including resources for teachers and students such as learning outcomes, activities, and additional readings and commentary, this well-written and beautifully presented book will be a valuable resource to anyone interested in new perspectives on childhood in the digital age.
This volume offers a critical rethinking of the construct of youth wellbeing, stepping back from taken-for-granted and psychologically inflected understandings. Wellbeing has become a catchphrase in educational, health and social care policies internationally, informing a range of school programs and social interventions and increasingly shaping everyday understandings of young people. Drawing on research by established and emerging scholars in Australia, Singapore and the UK, the book critically examines the myriad effects of dominant discourses of wellbeing on the one hand, and the social and cultural dimensions of wellbeing on the other. From diverse methodological and theoretical perspectives, it explores how notions of wellbeing have been mobilized across time and space, in and out of school contexts, and the different inflections and effects of wellbeing discourses are having in education, transnationally and comparatively. The book offers researchers as well as practitioners new perspectives on current approaches to student wellbeing in schools and novel ways of thinking about the wellbeing of young people beyond educational settings.