Gracie Miller's Response to Children's TV

In watching all of the presentations on Children’s television, as well as giving one myself, I learned that the hidden curriculum taught in preschools is more of a general undercurrent in the world of young children.  While as many of my classmates pointed out, PBS is generally a less biased channel than Nickelodeon; none of the children’s shows were free from stereotypes or gender preferences.  If I were to pick one show that I believe is the best out of all of the shows that were presented, I would have to pick Arthur on PBS.  This choice also seemed to be common among the children’s TV presenters.  Though Arthur is certainly not free of gender bias by a long shot, it does appear as the consistently least biased.  Likewise there are many factions of society represented in Arthur, not just through race or gender, but differences in class (Muffy vs. Francine), physical abilities (handicaps or injuries), and family compositions (adoption, grandparents, single parents).  After all, it seems to me that if all shows are going to continued gender stereotypes and therefore proliferate “doing gender” then I would want my children to watch shows that at least give them different options within gender (tomboy, girly girl) as well as a show that celebrates differences, not just similarities.  Also I felt that the mutual acceptance of Arthur as a “good” show among the presenters was felt because Arthur deals with interesting and “smart” subject matter including poetry, travel, and nutrition.  As one presenter commented, she still enjoyed watching Arthur today as much as she did when she was a little kid because she still found the shows engaging, and I believe that the tendency for Arthur to “talk up” to kids instead of down, as many of the shows profiled did (max and ruby), is the key to its success. 

I found it sad and interesting that female characters are underrepresented in children’s TV.  The underrepresentation ranged from clothes as in Little Red Riding Hood’s scanty leotard in Super Reader’s to behavior as in Dora the Explorer’s timidness in relation to her sidekick Diego.  Likewise as Emily pointed out in her presentation on Micky Mouse Clubhouse, the female characters in general take up less space, are dressed in pink or purple, mostly wear dressed and talk in annoyingly high pitched voices.  From the presentations given and the articles we have read so far this semester, it seems that the reason shows seem to play to boys and minimize girls goes back to society’s strong view that boys are boys and NOT girls, whereas girls can cross the gender boundary without much trouble.  So the networks make shows that have girl characters but give the boy characters prominence, because that makes it masculine enough for boys to watch and the thought is that girls will watch it anyway.  That way the networks have shows that reach both gender demographics and therefore have more opportunities for advertisers.  As it seems so many themes in society do, the themes and structure of children’s shows goes back to social norms and money, and as the source of funds for the network gets more commercial, so to do the shows have more extreme gender roles and social bias.  This was seen in the general differences in content between PBS who is funded publicly and privately, with little to no commercials, and Nickelodeon who relies on advertising for profits.