Six, Going on Sixteen

 

Rethinking Popular Culture and Media, Page 28

Geralyn McLaughlin has been a K-1 teacher for 18 years.  In her more recent years she has been entirely caught off guard by the problems she has been encountering around the over-sexualization of children who are her student's age (5,6,7 year olds). 

As she listened in on her students reciting lyrics to each other about partying in the club and drinking Hennessy, she realized that mainstream media was taking away their "chance to just be little kids".

In a class that she enrolled in called "Media Madness", she learned "how the corporate world deliberately targets vulnerable children," and how, "child development experts now work with marketing firms to optimize the impact of commercials according to the developmental stage of the target audience". 

McLaughlin explains the resulting age-compression which means that "children at ever younger ages are doing what older children used to do."

This age-compression which is spurred by the media has caused, "children [to] become involved in and learn about sexual issues and behavior they do not yet have the intellectual or emotional ability to understand and that can confuse and harm them."

After so many discussions with fellow teachers, parents, and past students she decided that the remedy existed in prioritizing imaginative play.  As she explains, when kids play with the big box shiny toys that are associated with TV shows and characters that the kids know, they are simply replaying a script.  A script which usually boxes boys into roles of violence and roles that tell girls that they need to be sexy. It is entirely limiting.  When they use their imaginations with simple toys instead, they get to create a new world and build anything they want. She wrote in a school newsletter, "Children need to play creatively.  They need to invent.  They practice problem-solving as their play evolves."

Like Turkle, she "wanted to encourage kids to turn off their screens and become more connected with the natural world, their classmates, and their own selves."

Like Mitra, she "designed unit[s] to celebrate and highlight children's ability to begin charge of their own learning as they create stories, invent problems, and evolve as powerful individuals. 

She witnessed how instead of boys playing Power Rangers and pretending to beat each other up, they were pretending to be doctors who were attending to sick baby dolls.  And instead of girls trying to emulate the Bratz dolls, with their 6 inch heels, push up bras and overdone makeup, they pretended to be the childcare workers in the hospital, identifying symptoms and suggesting cures.  The biggest difference was that this type of play left the children feeling satisfied.  

 

She started a number of school-wide initiatives that were meant to address the age-compression problem.  

1. The Toy Lending Library

with the aid of donations from local stores, families and the community she was able to build a collection of toys that spurred creativity and curiosity which students could sign out and take home with them.  

2. Turn Off Week

Students and their families made a pledge to spend one week without screens.  They prepared everyone for the week with assemblies and in-class conversations that were full of suggestions for what one could do instead of spending time in front of a screen.  It was a success, and most of the students found that they ended up spending more time outside, more time learning or improving upon skills, more time connecting with their family.  

3. Family Game Night

An evening at the school when students and their families would get to participate in a pot-luck dinner and interactive games all together such as Twister, Uno, bingo, Blackjack, Spoons and Charades.  

Parents continually asked when the next game night would be.  

She recognizes that trying to fight against mainstream media's assault on our young is an uphill battle but that, "protecting them from a corporate world that forces them to grow up too soon, and promoting their creative play are two giant leaps in the right direction".