Riffing on Kids and Mass Media

[pantryslut]

So I just finished reading Peggy Orenstein's Cinderella Ate My Daughter, which was entertaining if not super-revelatory to someone who realized long before their daughters were born that yes, one of my main parenting tasks would be "protecting their childhood from the marketers' land-grab" [paraphrased].

There's something that's bugging me, though. It's bugging me especially hard as I've been watching the video version of Where the Wild Things Are (and In the Night Kitchen, and the Nutshell Library) incessantly. Orenstein does not entirely lapse into the common trope of blaming mass media per se for stultifying our kids' imaginations, but it's certainly present in some form, if only quoting others who proclaim that Disney princess movies deliver a prepackaged storyline that gets ritualistically replayed by young viewers, without imaginative variation, and that's BAD. Unlike books, which are always GOOD. You know how this goes.

I am still trying to figure out how it is that books are good and imagination-promoting, while TV and movies are not. (And let's not even get into other electronic media here. I personally think that at least some video games are guilty of exactly what people blame "media" for, i.e. rigid storylines that do not promote imaginative play [which, btw, is different from stunting it] -- but only some. As with other media, it depends on what you choose and how you engage with it, to my eyes.) How this is anything but snobbery. How is reading WTWTA twenty million times over a great way to connect with your kid, but watching it together is not? How is the storyline in a book *not* a rigid, prepackaged product, too? I mean? Especially picture books, where you can't argue what I always hear print fans argue about visualizing it all in your head? It's on the page, you don't have to. Down with picture books!

I mean, it depends on how you do it, right? If we were all zoning out in front of the Great Unblinking Eye, that would be one thing. If we're asking questions about what we see (hi, y'all, welcome to preschool media literacy class), if we're getting up out of our chair to imitate the wild rumpus, that's another, I suspect.

Yes, a homemade Cinderella costume is more creative than one bought off the rack. Is this the fault of the movie, or the marketers? The medium, or the economic system it's embedded in (aka capitalism)? You can probably guess my answer.


P.S. I actually rather dislike the narration of the Scholastic video version of WTWTA. Thus is my cross being borne.

Comments

[marialuminous.livejournal.com]

I spent yesterday witnessing your daughters' rigid and ritualistic retelling of stories, and I think some aspects of that rigidity are very important parts of their learning. While we read Where the Wild Things Are, April was very engaged in the act of explaining to me what happened, and in what order, and on which page. She would turn to one page and say, "No roll terrible eyes", and then go look for a scene in which they did roll their terrible eyes.

In some ways it reminds me of what one of my creative writing professors liked to say -- we needed to learn the forms and structures of poetry and other forms of writing before we could really be creative with it. Learn the rigid structure first, so then you know the most effective ways of breaking it. I think a lot of early cognitive development in children is similar -- they are studying patterns and sequences and categories, and for a while they become rigidly fixated on them, but that might be an important phase in their greater understanding and creative development. So I agree with your opinion on that.

[trinker.livejournal.com]

I have complicated thinky thoughts on all this, which aren't really well-formed, but I think the "imaginative play" metric is the wrong thing to evaluate books vs. tv/movies by. Also "connecting with your kid" and "rigid, prepackaged product".

It's all *mu* to the reasons why I choose to maximize my kids' reading time vs. tv time.