children’s television

children’s television, television programming intended by its network or producers to be watched by viewers between the ages of 2 and 11. The specific programs broadcast for children are determined by age, demographic, time of day, network, nation, historical period, and other factors. Many different kinds of programs can be considered part of the genre of children’s television, one determined by its viewers more than its content. Controversies persist about what television programming is appropriate for children, but since sets began entering family homes in developed nations around the world in the 1950s, television has become central to contemporary childhood.

This entry surveys how the relationship between children and television has evolved from the broadcast era to the digital era, primarily in the United States, but also in the United Kingdom and Japan. It then discusses the tension between education and entertainment inherent in children’s television programming, two iconic children’s programs from each of these three global media-producing nations, controversies about the effects of television on children, the role of art in programming, and technological changes in children’s media.

Children and television in the broadcast era

Children and television have both changed dramatically across the historical moment following World War II. What children’s relationship with television is and should be has been persistently controversial among a wide variety of adults, including parents, commentators, policy makers, and scholars. In the era of analog broadcast, television became central to the child’s world in the home, although in the digital era, new technologies directly or indirectly linked to television have come to command more of the child’s attention.

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The introduction of television into middle-class homes in developed nations after World War II reshaped the households of families, but given their youth, children were perhaps most changed. Growing up in front of live moving pictures in the household changed children’s lives, and television became the hub of the home for many families.

In making television programming specifically for children, broadcasters and producers carried on earlier traditions of children’s culture (following puppet shows, children’s movies, children’s radio, and animated films). But children’s television programming became a new and child-friendly media format. Children became a dedicated segment of the broadcast audience, more than with movies or radio. Generally, programs for children sought to balance entertainment with education, to widely varying degrees.

Children and adults admittedly have different perspectives on television. From a young age, children often quickly become comfortable with television. But rapid technological and social changes to the technologies of television and its programming formats have alarmed some adults, who have seen in television serious threats to the well-being of children. Admittedly, children are susceptible to the commercial messages of television. Still, the majority of adults recognize media programming as a household fact of life and regulate it as desired.

Public service and commercial broadcasting

Television has typically been introduced to consumers primarily as a medium of commercial entertainment. Many observers believe, though, that the state should provide educational television programming to children; in countries such as the United Kingdom and Japan, public broadcasters tax all viewers to fund such programming. Thus, publicly funded television networks tend to air education-focused programs to children on behalf of the state, while commercially funded networks tend to show entertainment-focused programs to kids in media markets in pursuit of profit. This tension defines all children’s programming: When programs for children have too much entertainment and not enough education, adults may fault the content as not serving children. But when programs have too much education, and not enough entertainment, children may fault the content as not serving children.

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Before the 1980s, many European countries prohibited advertising during children’s educational programming. But when commercial broadcasters began operation, like Britain’s ITV in 1955, their marketing-oriented programming challenged the previous public broadcasting stations, like the BBC. Despite their parents’ wishes, when children hold the remote control, they have been drawn more frequently to commercial entertainment than to public educational television.

The United States led the way in marketing to children. Initially, in the 1950s, children were not seen as a profitable audience by American advertisers because they had little direct purchasing power. In the 1960s, sweetened breakfast cereal and toy manufacturers realized that children have great indirect “pester power” over their parents—a boom in advertising of such fun products to children followed. Year after year, cartoons remained perennially popular with children, and these became less expensive to produce with techniques for limiting on-screen movement. The local live-action children’s shows which had sprung up on local broadcasting stations around the United States beginning in the late 1940s nearly entirely disappeared by the 1960s.

For commercial broadcasters around the world in the 1960s, children’s television cartoons became a huge moneymaker. The BBC and other European public broadcasters resisted airing American cartoons, and they struggled to find ways to adapt to children’s changing viewing preferences. By the 1970s, most American cartoons moved to Saturday mornings, with occasional weekday afternoon times, both broadcasting blocks saturated with punchy commercials. The excess of commercial animation led many observers to decry children’s television as lacking both educational value and artistic ambition.

By the 1980s, the economic motivations of much children’s television had become central to the form itself, as this was becoming a highly profitable business model. Successful cartoon properties were making money not just from sales to broadcasters in countries around the world but across increasingly elaborate distribution chains: through sales in ancillary markets such as home video and cable, toy merchandizing, and marketing tie-ins and promotions. Profitability in any of these areas tended to reinforce the same in other areas. The measure of whether a broadcaster or sponsor would green light a cartoon became whether it is “toyetic”—that is, is the cartoon likely to sell toys, or not?

Television by the 1980s was becoming central to a new kind of (post) modernity. As early as the mid-1950s, Japan took notice of the marketing revolution occurring in America and began to pursue similar marketing strategies to develop and commercialize their media environment. At varying rates over the subsequent decades, in other developing countries around the world, television broadcasting infrastructure, production studios, and home television sets spread, often following American precedents and programming.

Many consider the production of children’s television to properly be a national right for each country. The state can use television to educate children according to its national priorities, such as by socializing and preparing young children for public education, teaching them the basics of the national language and culture. In reality, in many less affluent countries, more dominant regional and global players have assumed an outsize role in setting the media agenda.

Children’s television in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Japan

Across the history of television, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Japan have together produced much of the important children’s programming. This section highlights two important programs from each country, one from the 1950s or 1960s and one from the 1990s. These six popular programs have had an outsize influence over the rest of children’s television programming.

During the time of radio in the 1920s and 1930s, the public service journalism and cultural distinction of the United Kingdom’s BBC had perhaps the largest influence on broadcast media around the world. But, after television arrived, commercial American corporations often produced the most popular entertainment television programming, influencing the television broadcasting systems of countries around the world, even the BBC. In a sense, Japan’s culture is both older and newer than that of the United Kingdom and the United States. In the 1980s, Japan’s home electronics hardware, like television sets and video technologies, held a dominant role around the world; for a time in the 1990s, Japan’s media products challenged American dominance.

The United Kingdom’s publicly funded BBC was an early and influential producer of children’s television. Opposing American cartoons for much of its history, the United Kingdom tended to embrace a variety of live-action genres. This trend is represented in the BBC’s hit Blue Peter (1958– ), the longest running children’s television program in the world, which long ago established itself as a British cultural institution. The show has a nonfiction magazine/entertainment format emphasizing exciting segments, such as craft making, celebrity interviews, and competitions. Its adventurous spirit and nautical iconography recall Britain’s imperial age of ship faring.

Japanese popular culture changed with the broadcast of Tezuka Osamu’s Astro Boy (1963–66), the first animation-only television series to establish the aesthetic of Japanese anime. The danger and violence of Tezukas tales was balanced by themes respecting life, nature, and peace. The success of Astro Boy nearly single-handedly ignited a boom of Japanese animation that never abated, and many later cartoon series adopted its characteristics, including science fiction themes, cute characters with big eyes, and epic battles.

The debut of Sesame Street in 1969 on the new American national public television network Public Broadcasting Service marked the beginning of an evolution in children’s programming. The program was informed by large-scale and ongoing research on child development: It used short segments of live-action production, the puppetry of Jim Henson’s Muppets, and animation to promote both traditional literacy and media literacy. The program was successful across the United States, which led to parallel versions being produced in countries around the world. One of the few successful live-action children’s programs of its time in the United States, Sesame Street was also a model of progressive politics for children, promoting personal difference, dialogue, and acceptance.

The 1990s marked a new phase of children’s television. The adaptation of the Japanese entertainment phenomenon of Pokémon, beginning in 1996, was a watershed event beginning a multimedia generation of global media franchises. Pokémon is about catching, training, and battling supernatural “Pocket Monster” creatures with other players. First a handheld video game, Pokémon morphed into a trading card game, a manga comic, a television anime series, and a feature film. The success of each helped to spread Japanese anime around the world. While Pokémon has been criticized as a never-ending commercialization of children’s culture, the franchise has also pushed the sophistication of its media, revolving as it does around a vast world of hundreds of cute, non-Western creatures.

Teletubbies (1997–2001; 2015– ) is a British program for very young children, around age 2. The BBC’s attempt to participate fully in the commercial broadcasting landscape without sacrificing its public service bona fides, the unusual series follows four infantile multicolored creatures, named after the television screens implanted in their abdomens, who speak in a toddlerlike babble. A parable of growing up in a technological world, the mildly dramatic events on the shows surreal grassy set are intended to gently model everyday life transitions with production design friendly to infant perception and cognition. The programs un-English diction, ritualistic format, and psychedelic colors stirred controversy with traditionalist Britons but found appeal around the world, not just with toddlers but also with university students.

SpongeBob SquarePants (1999– ), a goofy, campy American television cartoon, is a postmodern hybrid in many ways. Ostensibly a children’s cartoon, it has also found a huge number of adult fans. Sincere in tone and subversive in implication, it stars an androgynous boylike sea sponge with the body of a square yellow kitchen sponge. Set underwater, on the ocean floor of a reef, the series rejects many grown-up pretentions and embraces the strangeness of everyday contemporary life, blurring the boundaries between childhood and adulthood. In the decades since its debut, SpongeBob SquarePants has seemingly only gotten more popular with viewers of all ages around the world.

Controversies and effects of the media

Controversy over children’s programming on television has been a constant refrain in public discourse since the early days of television—with surprisingly similar themes in many different countries. Moral watchdogs of many stripes have decried the influence of television on children as malign, but these have been adults speaking to other adults. Children themselves seem largely oblivious to this controversy.

Initially, television was sold to families partly on the educational promise it offered to children. But, on May 9, 1961, U.S. Federal Communications Commission chairman Newton Minow set a now-familiar discourse into motion when he decried commercial television as a “vast wasteland” of genre formulas, advertisements, and violence. A small number of recurrent critiques of children’s television have echoed throughout the public sphere for decades since that time, in countries around the world. Children’s programs are lacking in quality and taste, critics contend, and are too commercialized to raise informed citizens. Children’s programs are too violent, they say, and television viewing is too passive.

The aims of such critics are implicitly that the opposite should be true: Children’s programs should be engaging, high-quality lessons in civic-mindedness featuring cultural touchstones. Such shows should showcase prosocial, nonviolent behaviors which promote ethical decision-making and sensible healthy lifestyle choices. Activists, led by Action for Children’s Television, pushed the children’s television industry for years to reform. Their efforts did facilitate the passage of the U.S. Children’s Television Act of 1990, which mandated that networks show educational programming every week. Research studies found modest evidence for aggressive behavior following children’s watching of violent scenes, although evidence as firm as critics convictions never truly materialized.

Implicitly, some media watchdogs rely on oversimplified models of communication like the hypodermic needle theory, which holds that an idea can be directly injected into a persons mind by a media message. However, this theory was disproved by empirical studies in the 1940s. During the time of television, the predominant approach has become the encoding/decoding model of communication, which holds that messages are encoded by producers through the representational codes of television and then decoded by the viewers. This understanding foregrounds the viewers agency and interpretation. Along these lines, a more constructive goal for activism might be to foster children’s media literacy to enable them to better evaluate ambiguous messages.

A brief history of the Nickelodeon cable channel shows the activity, instead of passivity, of children’s television viewing. When initially launched in 1977, Nickelodeon had no advertising and branded itself as the “green vegetable” network that was also “fun.” Children stayed away, and the channel became literally last in cable ratings. In the mid-1980s, the network rebranded itself through fun, spirited programming. The overtly prosocial messaging was dropped, advertisers were added, and branding was introduced intending to empower kids (at the comic expense of adults). Kid viewers trusted this network which esteemed their active, savvy intelligence and did not condescend to them according to adult moral prescriptions. Researchers studying Nickelodeon have found this more sophisticated model of media messaging to better reflect how children actually watch television.

Artistic aspects

Children crave familiarity, but as they develop, their tastes change and they pay attention to new kinds of programs that surprise and delight them. In the 1980s, cookie-cutter approaches to animation had dominated broadcast schedules for over two decades, but in the 1990s, aesthetically and culturally surprisingly new approaches to animation popped up on television networks. At the time, American cable networks Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, and Disney Channel were expanding market share by offering cable service in many countries around the world for the first time, like the United Kingdom. In programs like The Powerpuff Girls (Cartoon Network, 1998–2005), these American networks featured artist-created aesthetics, creating new cultural ways of seeing that have remained personally relevant to children’s lives.

Regulators and activists had criticized what was bad about American commercial television, but this did not ultimately improve television programs for kids. A confluence of other factors combined to do this: the technological shift from broadcast to cable, networks’ new tolerance for taking creative programming risks, and a broadening of audiences to include adults. A progressive culture change was taking place that rendered moralizing less relevant to many stakeholders.

Japan’s animation and video games became newly vibrant in the 1980s, and both forms of entertainment made their way to the United States. A renewed appreciation for the vital legacy of American cinema animation also contributed to a growing innovation in American television animation. CBS, Fox Broadcasting, Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, and Disney all gave voice to a new generation of “creator-driven” television animation.

Novelty for its own sake had dominated commercial American broadcast cartoons in the 1970s and 1980s, but in the 1990s, the creative programming risks these networks took began to pay off commercially. Cable shifted the paradigm of animation to fresh, authentic programs capturing kids personal experiences growing up in the contemporary world. The American cable corporations aggressive market strategies opened doors to viewers in new countries around the world, leading to their continuing global dominance in children’s programming. But these media companies could not have succeeded without quality programming viewers wanted to see. Nickelodeon took a leading role, hiring relatively young artists to produce its “Nicktoons.” Cartoon Network, and eventually Disney’s multiple channels, followed suit.

Kids in the 1990s suddenly asserted a taste for entertainment alternatives, including Pokémon, Teletubbies, and SpongeBob, often bizarre or subversive by design. Commercial television need not be passive; even for adolescents, experiencing artistic expression can be a form of social learning.

Children and television in the digital era

In the 21st century, television no longer dwells at the center of children’s lives, as it did in the 20th century. In the 1980s, technologies including video games, VCRs, and cable augmented broadcast television. In the 1990s, computers spread to workspaces around the house, connected to the Internet, and began to displace television. In the 2000s, digital sets and digital broadcasting, as well as the spread of streaming services, redefined television. By the 2010s, the attention of children and commentators had become more keenly held by those Internet-connected personal digital devices, a new social and technological frontier still coming into relief.

Whether on a television or a device and whether via broadcast, cable, or streaming, children, like adults, still watch “television.” After being underserved for much of its history, children’s television programming in the 2010s emerged as vibrant and valued as ever. The sophisticated adult programming that became available through Internet streaming services like Netflix in the 2000s led critics to call the era a new golden age of television. Quality children’s programming emerged as an asset that streaming services could use to appeal to the children of the household. Streaming services adopted a multipronged strategy of competing for existing series, like international hits (Peppa Pig) and popular American educational children’s series from Public Broadcasting Service (Wild Kratts), as well as creating their own exclusive series (Amazon’s Lost in Oz).

The original version of this article was published by SAGE Publications in The SAGE International Encyclopedia of Mass Media and Society.