Abstract
Reviewed by: Colin Heywood, University of Nottingham, UK
This study from Helle Strandgaard Jensen analyses public debates about children’s media in Scandinavia between the 1950s and the 1980s. Today, this issue is rarely out of the news. History, she argues, allows us to step back and reflect on questions such as ‘who set the public agenda in debates about children and media? Why did these groups change over time?’ (3). It is an ambitious work. In the first place, it covers all of the principal media influencing children – film, books, comics and television – instead of the usual separate treatment by specialists in each field. Here the author treats children as consumers rather than, say, readers or viewers, and focuses on the message rather than the medium. Her assumption is that ‘what connects attitudes towards children’s media across different media types are their underlying ideals about childhood and the roles media should play in children’s lives’ (4). In the second place, the book provides a systematic comparison of debates around children’s media in all three of the Scandinavian countries: Denmark, Sweden and Norway. This involves playing down national differences, and taking advantage of the shared ideas and transfers between countries. These are traced across three periods, demonstrating the changes in ideas, while also setting them in the context of the Scandinavian model of the welfare state.
The work begins in the 1950s, with what now appears a rather bizarre concern about children reading comics featuring superheroes such as Superman and Tarzan. In the aftermath of World War II, however, this made some sense, with the violent methods of such characters being seen as inappropriate for a democratic society, and indeed an unwelcome intrusion from American capitalism. At this point, the leading lights in the debates were teachers, librarians, psychologists and psychiatrists, keen to promote ‘good books’ from the literary canon, and to defend the interests of children, deemed to be ‘fragile and unaware of their own needs’ (56).
We then move on to the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the subversive spirit of May 1968 played out in the debates. This section focuses on the influence of the Swedish author Gunila Ambjörnsson’s Trash Culture for Children (1968), and the radical upheaval it launched. This was scathing about the low quality of commercial products, called into question the value of supposedly high-quality works, and shifted to a sociological understanding of children as competent actors in their own right. Literature and other media were accused of being out of touch with children’s everyday lives, and in need of a dose of social realism. During this period, it was a younger generation of intellectuals and producers of children’s media who made the running.
Finally, the period 1975–1985 brought new upheavals, against a backdrop of economic crisis and pressure on the welfare state. In Scandinavia, the author argues, heightened concern over the intrusion of electronic media into children’s lives took a different form to that in Britain and America. Instead of concern over access to ‘adult’ material, fears over Neil Postman’s ‘disappearing childhood’ were linked to ‘myths of a timeless essence of play, imagination and creativity’ (110). Children were now perceived to be vulnerable to exploitation by commercial interests, but rather than the protection of the 1950s, the call was for support for what was thought to be their natural creativity and spontaneity. Thus in children’s literature, social realism went out of favour, and the key words were now fantasy and imagination. Even television programmes could have a positive role to play, according to some producers and media researchers, broadening their horizons and introducing them to the arts.
Strandgaard Jensen has researched her topic thoroughly, consulting over three thousand articles from newspapers and periodicals, supplemented by relevant material in other publications such as books and policy papers. The arguments put forward are persuasive and the prose style clear. She might have enlivened the text, and helped the reader, with some quotations from the ‘trash culture’ to give a hint of the lurid material allegedly leading children astray. She might also have missed a trick in not taking the opportunity to introduce some illustrations from comics and other visual material. Nonetheless, readers of EHQ will doubtless appreciate this contribution to a historiography generally dominated by research into experience in the USA and the UK.