Stereotypes in Children's Media

Chellis Allen:

Stereotypes within toys and their advertisement have been helping to aid societal stereotypes of what roles women should play in society. Watching channels that geared to children toy ads are in the top 3 types of commercials. Many of these toy commercials are gendered, aiming to relate to at least one of the genders. Women have been shown to have a higher percentage in purchasing products. They are the target consumer. Naturally more of the ads shown during commercial breaks will be geared to girls or have a neutral trend to it. Habits and norms are engraved into children because of how impressionable they are, and we tend to learn at an early age through observation. Societal norms tells us women should cook, clean and me feminine and attractive. The toy ads that have been shown are products such as, the Easy Bake Oven, toy modeled kitchens and Barbie. Boys usually are in commercials with water guns or toy action figures or even something related to sports. Why would a young girl need a toy oven or kitchen? This continues to show the stigma of women being in the house to cook and clean. It is made to seem like fun and as the girl gets older she is already prepared to do what society calls for them to do.

Barbie has been displayed as this character that girls should strive to be, she can do anything she puts her mind to, she has more than 20 different career paths mind you, and let us not forget she is attractive. She is a slim doll that has and extremely small waist line and some curves. According to numerous studies done, girls who play with Barbie, ages 5 and over, have lower self-esteem regarding their body image. Barbie also has products like her dream house, which stick with the stereotype of females being in the home. In the videos below, each of these commercials only shows girls playing with these products. This only begins to let both genders know that it is only socially acceptable for females to play with these toys. We know society has changed, but it seems like advertising for children hasn’t. Sexual orientation is a touchy topic for all ages, but also difficult to explain to younger children. The stereotypes displayed for girls to play with dolls and to cook and clean may limit them to being who they are as well as boys who would much rather lay with toys that aren’t marketed to males. Children are supposed to have free imaginations but stereotypes with toys ads have constricted and defined who they are before they are even sure of themselves.

Links

Easy Bake Oven:

Barbie:

Source

http://empowering-girls.blogspot.com/2011/03/research-does-barbie-impact-girls-self.html

David Daniels IV:

           As we’ve been learning in class, the media creates, shapes, and affects children in a number of ways, including indoctrinating them with gender norms that teach them how they are “supposed” to behave.  They learn that to be a boy or a girl comes with a certain set of roles one must perform in order to properly belong. This phenomenon occurs at every level, and advertising to children is a powerful tool of gender socialization.  One of the most potent forms of gender socialization comes through toy advertisements.  So-called playthings designed to promote a domesticated worldview are promoted to girls, things that are aimed to excite and encourage them toward housework, such as Easy-Bake Ovens and toy vacuum cleaners.  Boys, on the other hand, are targeted by ads publicizing more violent forms of play, as violence is equated with masculinity.

            Take commercials for “boys toys,” like the NERF gun ad I have linked here. A mock firearm advertised completely to young boys, as evidenced by the lack of female “players” in the commercial and appeals to “toughness,” viewed as an inherently male trait. This commercial stereotypes young boys as violent and tough, insinuating that they are supposed to play with things like guns, because guns are for boys (and NOT girls, because there are no girls in the commercial…inadvertently creating another stereotype of girls as being weak, or at the very least unfit for faux-gunplay.) What are these types of ads teaching our children about what it means to belong to a gender?  

Diana Niehaus:

Food, Funny and Fat.

            A stereotype that has become more frequent in the media is the idea that a fat character needs to be funny or has to be there to make the other characters look better. This character is either cracking jokes or doing stupid things to get the audience to laugh, they are there as comedic relief but never as a character the audience is supposed to fall in love with or root for. Off the top of my head Melissa McCarthy comes to mind as an overweight actress whose roles consist of crazy, tomboyish brides maid in Bridesmaids, and a southern identity thief whose main joke in the trailer is not being able to run away from the man chasing her. Of course we like to believe that these characters are doing good things for the overweight community. There are some who like to say that even having them on television is adding to the acceptance of people being overweight, however this type of stereotyping is not a accurate reflection of any person.

          The second type of character, which can be added to the first kind, is the character that is there to build up the main character. Every positive aspect the main character has, responsibility, determination; the secondary character has the opposite. And more often then not this secondary character is a bigger size than the main character. It perpetuates the idea that the fat character isn’t the main character, that they have a plethora of negative traits that help the audience identify that the main character is the idol; they are the ones you need to be rooting for.  

The Goonies

References:

http://www.npr.org/2011/08/08/138958386/big-fat-stereotypes-play-out-on-the-small-screen

http://pcasacas.org/SiPC/20.3/wedwick.htm

Brittany Robles:

          Stereotypes are something that are portrayed everywhere in media. Whether it be about different age groups, cultural backgrounds, gender or sexual orientation, it is hard to watch a television show that does not include these incorrect schemas. Perhaps a place were stereotypes are most prevalent are in tween and teen TV shows. Often times these shows take place in high school settings, which is a breading ground for stereotypes. There are countless examples of the high school captain of the football team being considered a “dumb jock” that gets all the girls and the cheerleaders being the mean girls that rule the school.  They depict the nerdy kids that do well in classes as the ones that get picked on and have no friends and everyone else is trying desperately to cling to their clique that they belong to.  Stereotypes such as these can be throughout the whole movie of “Mean Girls” but are especially dominate in the lunchroom scene. It is depicted a lot in shows that were you sit in the cafeteria defines your social standing and says a lot about your personality.  These stereotypes believe a lot of children to believe that what groups they belong to in high school can make or break how they are seen in the eyes of their peers, which is not true. By exposing kids to these stereotypes at a young age it is only making them become more of a reality and allow there to be countless “Mean Girls”. 

Skylar Smith:

            As children begin to develop, they start to absorb all of the information that surrounds them and this is why stereotypes in the media can be very dangerous to children.  Children might believe the stereotypes they see on television and associate them in real life.  There are a few issues in the representation of Latinos in cartoon characters, mainly “whitewashing” Latino characters and representing them as exotic or “the other.”  By 2050, Latinos could potentially be over 50 percent of the population (CNN, 2008).  This will be a historic event in the generation of the children today, so the representation of them should stop implementing the many stereotypes associated with them.  Disney just recently introduced the first Latina princess, Sofia who is the main character in Sofia the First.”  At first it may seem like a good step for the representation of Latinas but at looking further in to it there are many issues that concern the Latino population.

            Sofia is very light-skinned resembling other white characters like Snow White.  Latinos have a variety of skin colors from light-skinned to dark-skinned and are not defined by the color of their skin but rather base it on a “more culturally defined perspective” (Rodriguez 2000, p. 10).  This “whitewashing” of Latinos, also found in Dora the Explorer and Dragon Tales, is stripping them of their identity and assimilating them to fit the dominant culture. 

            Latino’s are also consistently being represented as a foreign character or exotic.  They tend to not fit in to the dominant culture, which is always pointed out to the viewer by the extreme foreignness nature assigned to them.  Enrique from the children’s show Dragon Tales is exoticized and represented as very different from the other characters.  Yes, Latinos and Hispanics have roots that trace them throughout Latin America and Spain but many Latinos are born in the United States and are a very big part of our population.  This constant portrayal of Latinos as foreign is a negative misrepresentation.  Unfortunately,  “Latino identity remains an alien presence that seemingly cannot be integrated into the mainstream social economy” (Serrato, 2009).

            Generally, the culture of children’s television shows today is getting more positive for Latinos and other minority groups but there are still these big issues that occur in children’s television shows daily.  Below is a link to a video project I had previously done with other University of Connecticut students, showing the important issues I have listed above.  Our goal of the video was to introduce a potential solution for an online show only, that allows viewers to customize their character before each season, allowing them to create a variety of representations.  

References:

Broughton, A. (2008, August 13). Minorities expected to be majority in 2050. CNN. Retrieved from http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/08/13/census.minorities/

Rodriguez, C. E. (2000). Changing race: Latinos, the census, and the history of ethnicity in the United States. New York, London: New York University Press.

Serrato, Phillip. (2009). “They Are?!”: Latino Difference vis-à-vis Dragon Tales. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, Volume 9 Number 2. SAGE Publications.