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Young children’s media reproduces and confirms racist, colonial, consumerist, heteronormative, and patriarchal norms

“[M]uch of young children’s media reproduces and confirms racist, colonial, consumerist, heteronormative, and patriarchal norms,” Timmerman and Ostertag write in their paper ‘Too Many Monkeys Jumping in Their Heads: Animal Lessons within Young Children’s Media,’ presented at Congress Wednesday.

Ms. Timmerman — a University of British Columbia PhD candidate in educational studies focusing on environmentalism — admits she’s no child psychologist, and admits there are probably extremely thin ranks of those fretting about “subliminal” messages in Goodnight Moon or Five Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed. “I do. But I don’t think most people do,” she said.

Her argument is that books and media are often the first exposure children under 4 get to society — and it’s a society in which tigers don’t talk, bears aren’t cuddly and rhinoceroses are creatures they may never see in their lifetimes.

“If they don’t see what it is that they experience reflected within that media, then they don’t come to value that experience as much or think it’s worthwhile,” she said in an interview at Congress this week.

In their paper, she and Ms. Ostertag recommend children age 0-4 should be primarily exposed to the creatures in their daily lives in their “full richness and ambiguity,” not zebras and elephants and tropical fish and toucans (that, apparently, can come later).

And then there’s the anthropomorphism — animals like Franklin and Arthur the aardvark and The Berenstain Bears wearing clothes and talking to each other and living in nuclear families.