“I find myself haunted (perhaps because I was a teacher) by a mental image of children’s faces pressed hard against the railings of a playground which lies silent and deserted behind them. The dull and child-like eyes gaze out forever upon the grown-up world they ache to join, never turning away even to look at each other.”
Quote: Mary Whitehouse, Daily Mail, 27 January 1981.
Photograph: BBC Test Card F as seen on BBC 1 from 1991 to , first aired on BBC2 in 1967.
In 1981, Mary Whitehouse wrote: “‘What’s a whore house mummy?’ asks the nine-year-old as he devours his snap, crackle and pop in front of the television before going to bed,” in her piece which was printed with the sub-heading “this shameful robbery of innocence.” Whitehouse firmly believed that television was robbing children of their childhood. Surely, this sort of reaction against television was not surprising coming from her, a self-confessed Conservative moral campaigner, known for her views against “permissiveness.”
However, Whitehouse was not alone in her criticism of the box. A decade later, Observer columnist Katz noted: “I am no Mary Whitehouse, I am all for openness and against heavy censorship.” “But,” she confessed, “even a woolly liberal like myself feels a nagging sadness for a loss of innocence, and a gradual passage to adulthood (…) in the age of TV and video, adults no longer have control over the rate of this learning process.” Television was not the only culprit for the robbing of childhood, but it was a close second after trouble families, and especially because it was used by those families as a babysitter.
When it came to identifying what was wrong with children watching television, many commentators noted some immediate ill effects as their primary concerns. According to Daily Telegraph’s Garner, TV shortened children’s attention span, pacified them, and kept them away from favorable activities like interacting with peers and reading. Yet empirical studies conducted at the time did not find this to be true. For example, Livingstone and Bovill’ research with 6 to 17 year olds found that very few children’s television viewership affected their involvement in other types of activities.
Other critics were more worried about what they percieved to be an attack on children’s innocence. According to this view, television exposed children to violence and sexuality before they were ready. “Childhood can’t exist unless in opposition to adulthood,” warned Cusk, and according to Kirch, premature access to adult knowledge was “robbing our children of the innocence of childhood.” This type of reaction against television was sometimes taken to such extremes that Graham Lord went as far as to tease, “all is not quite lost, there’s no television for a start, and the hungry children will doubtless remember their childhoods as nostalgically as I,” in his piece about child poverty in Mozambique published in the Spectator.
One of the first names who ignited this debate was American cultural critic Neil Postman, whose 1982 dated book Dissappearance of Childhood argued that access to adult culture, and particularly to television, would result in the disappearance of childhood. According to Postman, childhood was a product of print based culture, which created a barrier between the illiterate child and the literate adult, thus separated children from the rest of the society. “Television, by contrast, is an open-admission technology to which there are no physical, economic, cognitive, or imaginative restraints,” claimed Postman. “Whether this means that childhood is disappearing or that adulthood is disappearing is merely a matter of how one wishes to state the problem.”
Another worry, then, was the convergence of child and adult worlds. By introducing children to information about the adult information, television demolished the hierarchy between adults and children. It was presumed that once children were allowed access to that knowledge, they would lose respect for grown ups. As admitted by Max Davidson, adults now feared television viewing children, “whereas they used to fear us.” And this fear was a much more complex reaction than a simple concern over children’s disobedience against authority.
It should be noted that there was an immediate response Postman and others who claimed that that boundaries between children and adults were disappearing, especially from academic circles. In 1987, the Open University published a lecture titled Disappearing Childhood. Following an opening shot that summarised Postman’s claims over images of newspaper articles and photographs of children watching television, “is it as simple as this?” asked the narrator, and replied “children live real lives (…) many children don’t need TV to see or experience adult life.” According to the lecture, the cultural criticism of television suffered from a “cosy, middle class view of what children’s lives are really like.”
This balanced approach was drowned under the apparent panic which further intensified with the emergence of new information technologies which went above and beyond television in destroying information hierarchies. As underlined by Buckingham, the moral panic over children and television was one of the many examples that were “cipher for much more fundamental anxieties about changes in the social order, perhaps particularly in the relationships between adults and children.” Yet, throughout the 1980s and 1990s, these anxieties about social change did not ripen enough to be translated into political demands, but rather confined to attempts to control the immediate cultural product, such as video nasties, broadcast schedules, fashion codes, and child models on television.
Quoted News:
Mary Whitehouse. “Today’s children are deprived—of their childhood!” Daily Mail, 27 January 1981.
Adrienne Katz. “No TV sex please we’re parents.” The Observer, 6 September 1992.
Lesley Garner. “Innocence under siege.” Daily Telegraph, 4 November 1986.
Rachel Cusk. “How we turn children into our battlefield.” The Guardian, 3 December 1996.
Graham Lord. “The Sewer of Africa.” The Spectator, 5 May 1990.
C. L. Kirch. “TV violence.” The Times, 24 December 1992.
Max Davidson, “The lost poetry of childhood.” Daily Telegraph, 11 May 1994.
More on children and television:
Sonia Livingstone and Moira Bovill. Young People, New Media: Report of the Research Project Children Young People and the Changing Media Environment. London: Department of Media and Communications, London School of Economics and Political Science, 1999.
Neil Postman, The Disappearance of Childhood. New York: Delacorte Press, 1982.
David Buckingham. Moving Images: Understanding Children’s Emotional Responses to Television. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996.
Open University Lecture: Disappearing Childhood. Academic consultant Mary John. Recording Date: 7 August 1987.
Cary Bazalgette and David Buckingham (eds.) In Front of the Children. London: BFI, 1995.
Máire Messenger Davies. ‘Dear BBC’: Children, Television Storytelling and the Public Sphere. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
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