Are children too often the focus of science news reports?
Maxine Clarke
Wednesday, 29 April 2009 12:59 UTC
Alice Fishburn at The Science Project blog opines that “children are at the centre of an awful lot of science news stories”. Examples of what she calls an “apparent obsession” include she “the child who holds the key to swine ’flu” (The Sun et al.),childhood obesity, effects of new media and a host of health issues inclding autism, vaccines and cancers. “Is it simply a matter that sick children make for an emotive image”, she writes, “or are there some specific anxieties around the combination of children and science/ technology at work here?…Its also worth noting that children are rarely the assumed audience of any of these stories.”
Has anyone here noticed an exessive focus on children in popular science news and feature reporting? Is this likely to interest children in science (if they do read the stories concerned, that is? Or maybe if they don’t!)
Updated 29 April 2009 13:01 UTC
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Replies
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What a fascinating observation. I have noticed that the scariest horror films are the ones with creepy kids e.g. The Children, Chucky, The Omen, Village of the Damned… I could go on.
Maybe the image of a child with a voracious disease, innocently infecting the world, appeals to the same part of us that’s frightened by these horror films?
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I’m just about to start a dissertation looking at the current focus on children in nhs adverts (stop smoking etc.), as I too noticed a trend. Hopefully I’ll have some answers on why children are being used in this way fairly soon!
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With respect to changing attitudes to children, there was published a few years ago, in the ’80s I think, a fascinating history of a change in Western attitudes toward children. It was Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children by Viviana A. Zelizer. To summarize her argument in a single sentence, it was that children went from having an economic value to being beyond price.
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