Notion Of Crisis In Childhood

The twentieth century has witnessed many public discourses on childhood commonly invoking the notion of ‘crisis’. Childhood has significantly changed over time and is one that is built from a range of aspects such as education, and social development. However, the idea of childhood being in crisis can relate to many issues such as family breakdown, cultural or social changes, and the increase in technology. A crisis can be defined as being in a time of intense difficulty. This assignment will explore the ways in which dominant discourses such as the media, technology, education, and sexualisation collectively produce a notion of crisis in childhood. To examine how far the notion of crisis exists, this assignment will look at different perspectives

Cameron argued that the society should “stop treating our children like adults and adults like children” (Pilcher and Wagg, 2014: 261). In order to do this, the Bailey Report was set out to further tackle the ‘crisis’ in young childhood sexualisation. This report included the emphasis of the responsibility of parents, the need for consumer culture to be family friendly so that children are not forced to grow up too soon. This report also recommended that the magazines with sexualised images on their cover was not easy for a child to see, to reduce the amount of on-street adverts containing sexualised imagery, including an age rating for music videos, ensuring adult content was shown on television after the watershed, and lastly making it easier for parents to block adult content from the internet (Department of Education, 2011: 14). All these changes took place from 2011 and provided a chance for the crisis of childhood sexualisation to be decreased. Although all these new guidelines and policies were set by the government, it also is the responsibility of the parents to ensure that their children are not accessing adult content. Therefore, a child is at risk of sexualisation, however it is highly governed by the way parents allow or disallow their children to access such

Sue Palmers text has amplified the notion that childhood is in crisis with key ideas such as technology, media, education, and sexualisation. Palmer argued that children should be able to interact with others face to face and explore objects and be exposed to real speakers, and not ones that are screen based. For this reason it is argued that technology has had an impact towards childhood, thus conveying the notion of crisis. However, Buckingham critiqued this by stating that children who use technology can use it to their great benefit for educational use, and although it does not make a child creative, the potential of educational and communicative benefits far outweigh Sue Palmers notion of childhood crisis. Sue Palmer also questioned whether education amongst the early years was too soon. She also argued that extensive tests and early schooling was taking away a childhood for children thus creating a perception of