The third factor in gender segregation is behavior compatibility. This happens at around eighteen months, when boys and girls start to diverge in their interests and preferences and find that members of the opposite sex often do not like what they like. That is why boys would rather play with other boys, and girls with other girls.37 Time and again, studies have shown that boys prefer aggressive play, such as roughhousing, imaginary fights or battles, and rowdy sports. Girls, on the other hand, generally prefer play that requires fine motor skills, such as dressing and undressing dolls, designing jewelry, and other handicrafts.
Gender Differences in Media Preferences
The budding differences between boys and girls quickly become obvious in their media preferences. From the preschool age, boys and girls pay attention to different aspects of entertainment, including action, sports, competition, adventure, violence, and romance. Preschool boys have a stronger preference than girls for sports, action, and violence, both in books and in screen media. They also generally like scary scenarios, for example, ones featuring dinosaurs or aliens from outer space. They are interested in male fantasy heroes with supernatural powers, in sports stars, in knights and soldiers, and in doctors and policemen. Girls are more interested in nurturing themes and in relationships between people. They prefer contexts that feature castles, dance studios, schools, and farms, and that tend to focus on models, dancers, fairies, and princesses.38
In addition to content preferences, gender dramatically influences character preferences. Bradley Bond and Sandra Calvert were interested in understanding children’s favorite media characters as well as when children “break up” with these characters. In their work, they found that around two years of age, children’s favorite characters were not highly masculine or feminine. For example, girls often noted a preference for Sesame Street’s Abby Cadabby—described as an inquisitive, rambunctious little girl. Likewise, boys noted a preference for Thomas from Thomas the Tank Engine—a rather docile, altruistic character with a gentle, childlike personality. By the age of five, however, the majority of children had “broken up” with these favorite characters and had come to prefer much more feminized or masculinized characters, such as Disney’s Tinkerbell (a physically attractive, graceful fairy) or Pixar’s Lightning McQueen (an overly confident, competitive, bold character).39 It seems, then, that children’s preferences for media content—including media characters—become more gender stereotyped as their own gender identity becomes more rigid. These differences between boys and girls fade away during elementary school, but return with a vengeance once puberty hits. We look at this in more detail in the next two chapters.
Conclusion
As children grow and develop, their response to certain media or media content changes—sometimes even radically. Cognitive development and social-emotional development are among the best predictors of these changing media preferences in childhood. And while individual differences play a role in explaining the specific types of media that young children enjoy or dislike, development provides a useful starting point for assessing the types of media content that are likely to be “moderately discrepant,” and thus appealing, for children of different ages.
This chapter shows that development helps explain the shift between very young children’s stimuli-driven processing to older toddlers’ and preschoolers’ schema-driven processing. Further, content preferences (for example, fantasy content, repetition, slow pacing, narrative, familiar contexts) map closely on children’s cognitive and social-emotional development. And finally, at least among “under twos,” children’s media use remains the subject of a relatively contentious debate. While some argue that media use in early childhood is likely harmless and, depending on content, potentially helpful, others have fiercely opposite opinions—taking a decidedly vulnerable view of very young children.
As has often been seen in the history of media and technology, the truth is likely somewhere in between. What the debate about toddlers’ screen media use more generally does, however, is to highlight that studying the effects of children’s development on their media preferences is only part of the picture. Just as children’s development plays a role in predicting their media use, children’s media use can play a role in predicting their development. Later in this book, we discuss the thousands of studies on the positive and negative effects of media use in detail—thinking through the other side of the reciprocal relationship between development and media use.
5
CHILDREN
“There ought to be one fairy for every boy and girl.”
“Ought to be? Isn’t there?”
“No. You see children know such a lot now, they soon don’t believe in fairies, and every time a child says, ‘I don’t believe in fairies,’ there is a fairy somewhere that falls down dead.”
—James Barrie, Peter and Wendy/Peter Pan (1911)
As children leave the preschool phase and enter elementary school, they undergo an enormous surge of development. If we hope to understand the media they are interested in, it is crucial that we understand how they perceive the world. Without this knowledge, any attempt to reach this age group will be futile. To that end, in this chapter we highlight how children 5–12 years of age perceive the world—connecting this development with their media preferences. Since five-year-olds and nine-year-olds look at the world very differently, we divide this age period into two groups: young elementary schoolchildren (5–7 years old) and preadolescents (8–12). For both groups, we discuss the most significant developmental changes and connect these changes with media preferences. For example, what is the “spinach syndrome”? What sort of humor do children in both age groups prefer? Why do children recognize bad acting only at around eight years? Why does collecting become important to children in this period? And when and why does the peer group emerge as a key context?
Young Elementary Schoolchildren
The period from five up to eight years of age is generally considered a transitional time. Piaget believed that children between these ages were still in the preoperational stage. And in fact, many of the characteristics exhibited by toddlers and preschoolers carry over into this period. Physical growth continues, but more slowly and with less spectacular spurts than before. Children in this period are still perceptually bounded in that they pay more attention to the external features of an object or person than to information that is less explicitly perceptible. By the time they are nine, however, this tendency has largely disappeared. The same is true of centration (that is, their tendency to focus on the visually salient features of a product or person and their inability to take in multiple details at once). Although most children just entering formal school (around five years of age) still engage in centration, the tendency decreases during this transitional period, and by about nine years of age they are adeptly able to take in multiple details at once. Children’s comprehension of more complex narratives also continues to develop during this period. For example, their comprehension of movies that integrate multiple subplots or use sophisticated production techniques (for example, flashbacks) rapidly increases.
Most children this age still have trouble distinguishing realistic from unrealistic media content, but as with their perceptual boundedness and centration skills, their ability to separate fantasy from reality improves. Although children no longer believe that everything they see in movies is real, they still have doubts. This is the age when their unconditional belief in Santa Claus begins to waver. They no longer believe in him, but they are not absolutely certain either. They now know that Big Bird on Sesame Street is a person dressed in a costume, and they are starting to see that unrealistic stunts and special effects on television would be impossible in real life. Occasionally, a child will go a step further and believe that everything on television is fake, even realistic content. What most children find difficult at this age is to distinguish fiction (soaps, comedies with real-life actors) from reality. For example, they think that actors in a television sit
com have the same occupations in real life, and that onscreen families are real families offscreen. The latter is something that many nine- and ten-year-olds also still believe.1
Nevertheless, children in this phase undergo a number of changes that justify placing them in a separate age group. Perhaps the biggest change is the beginning of formal education. With formal school entry, they become slightly less dependent on their parents, particularly with regard to their playtime and media use. Thanks to formal education, children in this age group begin to read on their own, and they possess a vocabulary that is large enough to allow for detailed communication with adults. Their attention span dramatically increases. For example, while a three-year-old can concentrate on a single activity for a maximum of twenty minutes (and even then is easily distracted), a five-year-old can concentrate on a favorite activity for up to an hour. As a result, they can watch longer media content (for example, feature-length films) and can concentrate on games for quite some time.2 They also have a better sense of structure and rules than they did previously. For example, if they are given a new board game, their first aim is to learn the rules.
Media play an important role in the daily life of this age group. In our data from a large sample of Dutch children, for example, we found that young elementary schoolchildren spend an average of slightly more than two hours a day watching television or movies, playing games, or reading. Of this time, television dominates: children spend nearly seventy minutes a day watching it (online, on a DVD, or in some other format). Children of this age begin to incorporate electronic games (about thirty minutes a day) into their media diet, and spend a similar amount of time reading books or comic books (twenty-five minutes), either on their own or with their parents reading to them.
There is little difference in the amount of time that boys and girls spend on media, although boys spend slightly more time (thirty minutes) than girls (twenty-two minutes) per day playing electronic games. This is not particularly surprising, since it is more likely that content preferences would differ by gender than by media exposure amounts. These patterns of media use are not exclusive to Dutch children. Indeed, similar patterns have been found for children of this age throughout many industrialized countries; estimates suggest that these children spend roughly two hours a day with media, of which the greatest portion of time is typically spent with television or films.3
Humor in Media: “Why Are Frogs So Happy?”
Toddlers and preschoolers typically enjoy innocent, physical, clownish humor. From age five upward, thanks to their rapid linguistic development and growing ability to interact with others, they begin to show more interest in verbal humor such as riddles, word games, and mislabeled objects and events. Riddles such as “Why are frogs so happy?” “Because they eat whatever bugs them” are thought to be hilarious by children at this age. Moreover, they begin to appreciate humor based on conceptual incongruities, for example, an exaggeration or a distortion of a familiar situation or event (for example, “What do you get when you mix a cow and a duck?” “Milk and quackers!”).4
Although young elementary schoolchildren are not yet capable of engaging in the kind of fast-paced, humorous exchanges that typify adolescence, it is common to see them take an interest in naughty, socially unacceptable types of humor. Children as young as three imitate “dirty” words, but from about age five they start to use them more consciously and incorporate them into their humor. Jokes about human excrement will make many a child howl with laughter, explaining why books such as Walter the Farting Dog and Everyone Poops are international best sellers.5
Educational Media Begins to Bore
At around five, media preferences begin to shift. Young schoolchildren often begin to express a stubborn preference for violent, action-packed adventure programs, often to their parents’ great aggravation. These children prefer content that is faster and more complex, relies on less friendly characters, and uses more adventurous contexts, such as unexplored islands or alien planets. At the same time, children lose interest in educational television for preschoolers such as Sesame Street and Dora the Explorer, boys somewhat sooner than girls.6 Researchers have suggested that this shift from interest in educational to entertainment content reflects the so-called spinach syndrome: while toddlers like almost everything, five-year-olds reject anything that is supposed to be good for them.
Why are young elementary schoolchildren strongly attracted to fast-paced and action-packed entertainment? First, compared with their toddler and preschooler counterparts, children in this age group have dramatically improved cognitive-processing abilities, and so the slow (often educational) content they once preferred becomes boring. As a result, they search for more challenging (that is, faster and more action-packed) entertainment to meet their newly developed cognitive needs. Moreover, this type of entertainment offers them all the things that they love: action, physical humor, and moving “toys” in the form of cartoon or animated characters.
Another explanation is that the action and (occasional) violence in such entertainment programs can function as rebellion against the restrictions that adults impose on children. In particular, superheroes allow children to escape their everyday restrictions. By identifying with superheroes, children can pretend that they too are big and strong, and the feeling this gives them is pleasurable.7 This is because children take vicarious pleasure in the behavior of someone they admire and would like to resemble, but could never actually imitate. This process of wishful identification allows children to feel strong and powerful at a time when they are struggling with everyday problems that they cannot immediately resolve.8
A final explanation for the success of action-packed entertainment is that the events in this content often involve a group of peers or friends. Remember the moderate discrepancy hypothesis, whereby children are mostly attracted to media content that is moderately discrepant from their own experiences? Whereas peers are important in early childhood, peers and the corresponding social interactions among them become indispensable for young elementary schoolchildren. Thus, it is not surprising that as peers become increasingly important in daily life, children express an increased interest in peer and social interaction in media content. This particular interest continues to grow throughout preadolescence and adolescence.
Children in this transitional period begin to appreciate a different type of media character. They often start to gravitate toward so-called binary characters, which are, for example, extremely good or evil or extremely masculine or feminine. Adults often reject these characters as too stereotypical, and by many accounts, they are stereotypical. But children in this age group—and many older children—greatly enjoy entertainment with characters that present the world in binary contrasts. They often will use such portrayals to help them interpret the world around them and to help inform their gender identity.9
“When It Comes to Toys, Girls Will Be Girls and Boys . . .”
Speaking of gender identity, children in this transitional period typically become acutely aware of their gender roles, developing very rigid ideas about what members of their sex can and cannot do.10 As boys and girls spend more and more time in separate groups, they feel pressure to conform to behavior that the group sees as gender appropriate. Toy manufacturers, media developers, and advertisers know how to key into these notions. Experience has taught them that the most successful products for children in this age group are gender specific. “When it comes to toys, girls will be girls and boys will be boys” is their motto.
In any children’s toy store today, the striking degree of gender-role stereotyping is easily seen in the “pink” and “blue” sections of the store.11 Similarly, anyone watching commercials targeting children can see how well advertisers know that gender roles are rigid during this period. For example, in one study, researchers analyzed over six hundred commercials targeting youth. The analysis was designed to evaluate the types of “appeals” commonly used in commercials (that is, the approach used to attract and
influence consumers). Results showed that commercials offer boys an entirely different world from the one they offer girls. For example, whereas 76 percent of the commercials aimed at boys showed action and adventure, only 12 percent of the commercials for girls did. Thirteen percent of the boys’ commercials were about sports; none of the girls’ were. On the other hand, in the girls’ commercials, the top appeals were about nurturing, physical attractiveness, friendship, and affection for animals; not one of these themes was featured in any the boys’ commercials.12
Boys’ and girls’ gender-specific preferences at this age are clearly illustrated by their media preferences. For example, table 5.1 shows the top ten favorite games of boys and girls. The data come from one of our current longitudinal studies. Though the study follows Dutch children, these popular games, as many will recognize, are not specific to the Netherlands. Indeed, the majority of games on this list also appear on top ten lists across most Western countries. For example, at the time of this writing, Minecraft is the second best-selling video game worldwide, followed closely by Super Mario Bros.
What is striking about this table is that four of the ten favorite games appear on the lists of both girls and boys—namely, Minecraft, Subway Surfers, Mario Kart (different versions), and Super Mario (different versions). Closer inspection of the table, however, reveals a number of obvious gender-specific differences in boys’ and girls’ preferences. For example, dressing up dolls (Barbie), dancing (Just Dance), creating your own movie star on a pink planet (MovieStarPlanet), and taking care of an adorable pet (Pou) remain activities preferred by girls. Although Dora the Explorer appeals to some boys, she is mainly a girls’ idol and is likely to remain so. Racing, action, and sports games such as Cars, Skylander, and Fifa remain all-time favorites among boys.
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