Plugged In
Page 9
Table 5.1. Top ten favorite games among Dutch five- to eight-year-olds, by gender, 2014
Boys
Girls
1
Minecraft
Subway Surfers
2
Skylander
Dora
3
Super Mario
Minecraft
4
Lego
Pou
5
Mario Kart
Candy Crush
6
Angry Birds
Mario Kart
7
Fifa
Super Mario
8
Subway Surfers
Just Dance
9
Wii Sports Resort
Barbie
10
Cars
MovieStarPlanet
Source: Unpublished data from a study by Patti M. Valkenburg, supported by a grant from the European Research Council
Preadolescents
Whatever we call eight- to twelve-year-olds, whether preadolescents, preteens, or tweens, this group differs from their younger counterparts in numerous ways. According to Piaget, they are concrete-operational thinkers. This means that their thinking is based on a system of rules and logic, and—unlike younger children—they understand that the order of events can be reversed. For example, younger children typically struggle with what Piaget called “conservation tasks.” Imagine you have two glasses—one tall and the other wide. A younger child, upon seeing you pour water from the wide glass to the tall glass is likely to say that the tall glass now has more water—even though nothing has changed. The younger child is struggling with transformation, and instead judges the final outcome (the perception of the water being higher) rather than the process.
Contrast this with eight- to twelve-year-olds, whose cognitive development has significantly advanced. These children understand this transformation process and can easily explain that the amount of water has not changed, only the size of the container has changed. There is one proviso to this newfound logical thinking. Children at this age can apply their logic only to concrete objects or events. This limitation is how they differ from children over the age of twelve, the formal-operational thinkers, who can think logically not only about concrete phenomena but also about abstract concepts.
Eight- to twelve-year-olds are capable of “decentering.” Whereas younger children tend to focus on the most striking aspects of an object or a piece of information (referred to as centration in chapter 4), these children use their newfound logical abilities to scrutinize, down to the last detail, every product that attracts their attention. If a preteen is given a new pair of shoes, he or she will dissect and evaluate every aspect of the shoe, from the laces to the logo.13 Their growing critical faculties and their concrete-operational thinking drive them to compare everything in their surroundings against standards of genuineness and authenticity.
Children of this age become more critical not only of their parents, friends, and family, but also of commercials, games, and television programs that are not action packed or newsworthy. They are no longer as impressed by special effects and fantasy characters, and think that such features cannot compensate for a boring story. In addition, children at this age are able to divide their attention between many different activities, and nearly 30 percent of preadolescents use other media while watching television.14
Collect Them All!
As children in this age group develop an eye for detail and quality, they start to enjoy collecting or saving.15 Think about your own experience as a child of this age. What did you collect? Most often, preteens report collecting paraphernalia about sports (for example, baseball cards), media heroes (for example, Pokemon cards, Disney Infinity cards), or toys (for example, Beanie Babies). Why do tweens feel such a need to collect things at this particular age? Children of this age are concrete-operational thinkers. Besides having an eye for the details of objects that they collect, they feel a pressing need to follow rules and to order and categorize their surroundings. By saving and collecting objects, they can practice all sorts of new concrete operations, for example, grouping, ordering, classifying, and categorizing (see figure 5.1). Unlike younger children, they are capable of grouping objects by more than one criterion at a time (for example, shape, color, length, and thickness).
Figure 5.1. By saving and collecting, children can practice and enjoy grouping, ordering, classifying, and categorizing. (Mieke Dalle/Getty Images)
Younger children also tend to collect things, but they typically just want to have as many toys around them as possible. As they get older, they begin to collect objects because they feel a need to distinguish and differentiate these objects. They wish to exercise their newly developed concrete-operation skills, and at the same time they are naturally interested in the social opportunities that collecting offers them, for example, trading objects with classmates and playing games.
When it comes to media content, then, it makes sense that so much of the media content popular with this audience includes some aspect of collecting. For example, virtual gaming worlds such as Club Penguin, Minecraft, and Webkinz dramatically increase in popularity among members of this age group.16 A close examination of these games shows that collection is a key attribute in all of them. In Club Penguin, children can adopt different Puffles to care for, and they can collect a variety of clothing for their personalized character. In Webkinz, children are invited to collect as many animals as possible—each with its own games and activities. It is also not uncommon for toy and media conglomerates to market associated products to this audience. In fact, the phrase “collect them all!” seems to be almost commonplace in advertisements for this audience.
Magical Realism
Unlike younger children, preteens fantasize more about realistic situations. They take a sincere, sometimes disproportionate interest in real-world phenomena, looking for realism in toys, books, and entertainment programs.17 Because most of their fantasy characters have been demystified, they come to identify primarily with real-world human idols, such as sports heroes and movie stars. Interestingly, girls tend to be more interested in realism than boys, who generally remain longer attracted to fantasy scenarios. This gender difference helps explain why girls tend to prefer shows such as Zoey 101 and Victorious (shows featuring preteen drama), while boys tend to enjoy the superhero cartoons of their younger years for a bit longer.
Realism is a broad concept at this age, however. It is not necessarily true that children no longer enjoy fantasy per se, but instead, they are looking for realistic fantasy. In other words, children will still enjoy content that happens in a fantasy setting, but they want the characters’ experiences to follow the rules of logic.18 The Harry Potter series is a good example of this. The Harry Potter novels are what we would call “magical realism.” The situations described in the books and movies are entirely fantastical, but they also reflect the real world of preadolescents. The main characters are early adolescents with true-to-life emotions, and their experiences of love, competition, jealousy, and so on are convincingly depicted. This is similarly true of other popular realistic fantasy programs such as Aaron Stone or Wizards of Waverly Place.
Production Quality
Children grow progressively more social from about age seven. From then on, their social-emotional development increasingly influences their media preferences. One very important characteristic of preadolescents is that they are much better able than their younger counterparts to recognize and understand other people’s emotions. Four-year-olds can explain whether playmates are happy, sad, or angry, but they rely mainly on visible cues, for example, facial expressions. As they get older, however, children increasingly depend on less visible information (that is, by focusing more on motives and contextual information) to help them interpret other people’s emotions. They also start to understand that people can have more than one emotion at once, and that they can hide their feelings o
r even feign them.
Given these more advanced social-emotional skills, combined with their heightened interest in details and realism, it makes sense that preadolescents recognize and loathe bad acting (for example, unconvincing displays of emotion on television or in a commercial).19 In addition, children can be highly critical of entertainment and commercials that lack realism, as when an actor’s behavior is implausible or a product is presented in a fantasy context. Whereas the production quality of media content was not necessarily crucial for younger children, preadolescents place a high value on it.
Identification with Media Characters
Children’s ability to look at the world from another person’s perspective increases during the preschool and early elementary school years. Piaget regarded children under the age of about six as “egocentric” in their thinking. He meant not that young children think only of themselves, but rather that they do not see things from the perspective of others (their thoughts or feelings). Piaget came up with the term “egocentrism” to describe certain aspects of children’s language. Toddlers and preschoolers sometimes have a habit of talking without intending to communicate anything. They repeat something that they have just heard, or talk to themselves. Piaget referred to this type of language use as egocentric. Examples of this talk can often be heard at the playground when youngsters play “together” by playing independently and talking next to each other.
As they go through elementary school, children gradually become more skilled at seeing things from another person’s perspective. Children learn to consider others’ points of view simultaneously and to anticipate how they will respond in different situations, although this skill is still developing. As their ability to understand other perspectives improves, children’s understanding of human relationships changes. Whereas a preschooler often assumes that every social interaction with an available playmate makes that playmate a “friend,” by the time they are about eight, children grasp that they and their peers might have similar but also different interests, and they start to look for friends who are psychologically similar to themselves.20
Children’s growing capacity to see things from different perspectives influences not only how they deal with people in their real-life environment, but also their preferences for characters in media. While preschoolers tend to focus on physical similarities when it comes to character preference, preadolescents are more attentive to the psychological or social aspects of a character’s personality. In particular, more than ever before, preadolescents enjoy watching actors that are not only physically but also psychologically similar to themselves. By watching such actors, they have the opportunity to observe events and situations that might be relevant to their own lives. It is therefore no surprise that preadolescents tend to identify with same-sex characters, particularly when these characters share similar psychological characteristics. Finally, they often prefer actors of at least their own age, and teenagers and adults even more. According to preadolescents, these older performers are more attractive because they are involved in more interesting and exciting activities, and tend to be better actors than children.21 This sentiment reflects not only their increasingly critical view of media content, but also their increased interest in realistic content.
The Need to Belong
As children’s social-emotional development increases in complexity, so does their interaction with peers. This is logical. As preadolescents become better able to understand the perspective and emotions of others, their ability to interact with and share similar experiences with others also increases. We see that during preadolescence, peer groups become stable alliances that share common interests and explicit norms of behavior. While some children become sensitive to the opinions of other children before the age of six, this sensitivity heightens significantly during the preadolescent period.
Children become highly committed and loyal to the group to which they belong. They are mindful of how to behave, and they become sensitive to current trends. They do everything possible to avoid being ridiculed by their peers, for example, by avoiding the “wrong” clothes or media content. During this period, many children develop a strong aversion to entertainment that they regard as “childish.” When they are with their peers, they sometimes take special pains to distance themselves from the younger age groups for whom such programs were created. And as we discussed earlier, they become primarily interested in media products featuring characters of at least their own age or older—particularly content that highlights peer situations.22
Gender Differences
Preadolescent boys and girls differ in important ways when it comes to their entertainment preferences, but the differences are less stark than earlier in childhood. Boys continue to have a stronger preference than girls for action and violence, as they did in early elementary school. They generally like sports, science fiction, action, and adventure, and enjoy watching cartoons more than girls. Boys of this age still appreciate masculine action heroes, although they more often prefer heroes of flesh and blood. Watching adult television makes boys in particular feel “cool” and grown-up.
Girls generally have a more negative response to scenarios featuring action, violence, and horror, probably because—as they report—they are more likely to feel scared. In one of our studies in the Netherlands, we asked children about positive and negative experiences on the Internet. Girls described violence and pornography as negative experiences, whereas some boys regarded these same experiences as positive. We also asked children what elements they would include if they were producing a new entertainment program for kids. Only the girls spontaneously responded that they would not want to include sex or violence in the program.23
During this period, girls typically place greater value on a clear story line and—as mentioned earlier—are more attracted than boys to realistic dramas that depict developing relationships between characters. Girls prefer stories about families and attractive characters such as actresses, film stars, and pop idols. Compared with boys, for example, girls are more likely to seek out actors and actresses that they know, to spend more time looking for information about television shows and characters, and to want to watch a show from beginning to end.24 But it is a fallacy to think that only girls are interested in entertainment focusing on interpersonal relationships; if that were true, some online role-playing games would not be as popular among boys as they are. In many instances, the focus in these types of games is predominantly on story lines and character development.
Conclusion
This chapter took a detailed look at the cognitive development and social-emotional development of children. Given the significant changes that occur during this period, we divided this audience into young elementary schoolchildren and preadolescents in order to allow for a more detailed look at how development predicts media preferences. We discussed that between five and eight years of age, interest in educational media is replaced by an interest in faster and more complex and action-packed content. Moreover, children in this age group exhibit highly gendered media preferences—reflecting the statement that “when it comes to toys, girls will be girls and boys will be boys.”
Importantly, as children leave this transitional period, they enter preadolescence—a period characterized by a more sophisticated cognitive and social-emotional development. This enhanced developmental level leads to an interest in more complex and realistic content, and it can also make them more critical of poorly produced media content. They are interested in media characters that are psychologically similar to themselves, and in social situations with which they can identify and learn from. The media content and toys of their former years are no longer “cool,” and they quickly try to find their footing as soon-to-be adolescents.
Yet despite all their “adult” preferences, preadolescents are still children in many respects. Although they are reluctant to admit it, approximately a quarter of ten- and eleven-year-old girls still play with Barbies.25 They want autonomy, but
have a distinct preference for operating in the safe environment of same-sex groups. And while most have a budding interest in sexuality, they are mainly taken up with belonging and having lots of friends. No longer children, and not yet teens, they are truly “tweens”—working to find their footing in a complex world.
6
ADOLESCENTS
Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company; gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers.
—Socrates, 469–399 BCE
Complaints about adolescent behavior have existed since the invention of writing, and perhaps even before. Adolescence, the period between childhood and adulthood, brings about spectacular changes in the human body and brain. These changes have a huge influence on adolescents’ behavior and their interest in media. Studying these developmental processes helps us understand how best to appeal to younger and older adolescents. What, for example, interests young teens (ages 12–15) and how does this differ (or not) from what interests their older teenage peers (16–19)? What specific developmental characteristics typify these age groups, and how do these characteristics influence their media use and preferences? Why do teens enjoy sarcasm and fast-paced, humorous banter in media? Why do social media have such a “Pied Piper effect” on adolescents? And finally, how does teens’ developing autonomy influence their media preferences?