Abstract
Recent decades have seen a growth in children's environmental media. Amidst this expanding web of ecomedia for young people, children's news plays an important role in building awareness of environmental issues and shaping their meaning(s) for child audiences. However, there has been relatively little scholarly examination of children's news and its framing of the environment. This study responds to such a research gap with a framing analysis of 97 environmental stories produced by the Australian children's news program Behind the News. Three dominant frames are identified, constituting a mix of ‘child-specific’ and ‘environment-specific’ patterns of meaning: environmental stewardship; curiosity and wonder; and crisis and emergency. Unpacking these dominant frames, the article argues that framing patterns in children's environmental news help us understand adult imaginings of the ‘climate-changed child’ (UNICEF, 2023) while providing insight into the representational practices that make environmental problems visible to and available for interpretation by young audiences. The analysis also reveals that, while the framing of the environment in children's news is a mediating practice that controls and shapes the way young people are permitted to ‘look at’ the environmental crisis, it is also, at times, a transformational and creative act on the part of adult media-makers.
Keywords
Introduction: children's news, framing, and ecomedia
Children are at the centre of the climate emergency. Young people are impacted by climate change and related environmental problems in multifaceted ways: they face dire threats to physical and mental health from climate-related hazards (EPA, 2024) and the looming prospect of an unliveable future, to the extent that the global failure to act on climate change has created a ‘child rights crisis’ (Ryan et al., 2021; UNICEF, 2023). Unequally vulnerable to the physical, mental, social, financial, and cultural harms of the present (Atapattu, 2019; Kousky, 2016) while carrying the burden of an imperilled future, children are also emergent communicators and environmental actors who lead global discourse on the climate crisis. At the same time, today's children are avid media consumers whose attention is spread across a plethora of digital platforms and whose lives are increasingly digitised (OECD, 2025). While it is often claimed that such media consumption or ‘screen time’ drags young people away from nature or steals their ‘green time’ (Louv, 2010), media can also act as an informal educator that gives children access to environment-related information (Hawley, 2022). In this sense, media plays an important role in building awareness of environmental issues and shaping their meaning(s) for young audiences. To date, though, there has been relatively little scholarly examination of children's environmental media.
This paper addresses such a research gap by investigating a specific type of media – children's news – and its framing of environmental issues. I treat children's news as a site of environmental communication (Cox, 2007) that is worthy of examination for two important reasons. Firstly, the framing of environmental issues in children's news tells us much about the strategies and practices used by adults to communicate with children about the people/nature relationship in a time of crisis. In other words, an analysis of such framing helps us answer a timely question: how do we talk to children about complex environmental issues like climate change? Secondly, when we examine how the environment is framed in children's news we uncover (and produce) important cultural meanings about childhood itself. With these two objectives in mind, this study presents the results of a framing analysis of environmental news stories produced by its case study text, the Australian children's program Behind the News. It explains how these results help us understand adult imaginings of the ‘climate-changed child’ (UNICEF, 2023) while also revealing the representational strategies used to make environmental problems visible to and available for interpretation by young audiences.
Frames are patterns of interpretation or structures of meaning that help people make sense of the world – they are mental structures that can be made ‘real’ through cultural practices (Lakoff, 2010). The process of framing involves selecting aspects of reality and making them salient for an audience (Brüggemann, 2014; Entman, 1993). Frame analysis, in turn, is an approach where researchers ‘unpick’ framing processes (Kitzinger, 2007: 135). When conducting a frame analysis, researchers identify and examine ‘latent aspects’ of a text (Reese, 2010: 20), such as problem definitions and discursive elements. A framing analysis of news about the environment therefore gathers textual evidence to explain the way environmental topics and issues are packaged for interpretation in news media. As Lakoff (2010: 74) explains, ‘environmental frames are the (typically unconscious) conceptual structures that people have in their brain circuitry to understand environmental issues’. In the context of ecolinguistics, frames are much like Stibbe's ‘stories we live by’ which are defined as cognitive structures in the minds of multiple individuals across a culture, influencing their perceptions of the human/nature relationship (2015: 6). A wealth of research has shown that news has historically framed the environment in a way that ‘others’ nature, renders environmental problems invisible, gives problematic voice to climate denial, or emphasises individual action rather than policy change (Anderson, 2014; Nisbet, 2010; Trumbo, 1996). More recently, a crisis frame has been adopted in much news coverage of the environment (Feldman and Hart, 2021), while ‘climate action’ and ‘harmful impacts’ have been identified as common frames discussed in studies of environmental journalism (Guenther et al., 2024).
There is minimal research on framing the environment in children's news, although, more broadly, it is recognised that ‘the environment’ and ‘nature’ are topics that adults often consider to be of interest to children and that children themselves identify as relevant to younger generations. Indeed, longitudinal research by Notley et al. (2017, 2020) shows that ‘the environment and climate change’ are considered important and newsworthy by young news audiences in Australia. In his study of children's news, Buckingham points out that ‘ecology is so often framed as a “children's issue”’ (1997: 127), while Matthews’ analysis of the British children's news program Newsround identifies a special ‘newsworthiness’ of environmental issues for the child audience (2007: 432). Such notions are informed by cultural conceptions of a deep and unquestionable connection between children and the natural world – the idea that children have a ‘natural sense of relatedness to nature’ (Phenice and Griffore, 2003: 168). A persistent sense that children are, or should be, interested in nature has led to frequent depictions of environmental issues in media such as children's magazines (Adkins, 2004; Plevin, 2004), giving rise to ecological messaging in children's entertainment media (Gauntlett, 2005: 68; Hawley, 2022) and to the growing marketability of green content for young people (Bell, 2014; King, 1994). Today, there is more environmental media for children than ever before, and children's media outpaces other ‘genres’ when it comes to the incorporation of green themes (BAFTA Albert, 2022). Information, stories, characters, and worlds created specifically for children therefore play a meaningful and complex role in the production of ‘the environment’ for popular engagement, discussion, consumption, and sense-making, although some have argued that children's media does not always fully define environmental problems or map pathways for change (Starosielski, 2011; Moore, 2016). Importantly for this study, children's environmental media – made largely by adults for young audiences – is also a repository of adult concerns and desires about childhood in a time of ecological crisis.
How, then, do journalists create environmental content for children? Importantly, young people have more opportunities than ever before to engage with news in child-specific spaces, due to the proliferation of children's news outlets. Research shows that children value news and consume it regularly (Notley et al., 2017), and that inclusion in a news audience is central to children's sense of global citizenship (Carter, 2017) while contributing to the sustainability of the news industry through the early establishment of news habits (Valenzuela et al., 2019). As news audiences, though, children are distinct. Buckingham observes that children's news programs reflect but often diverge from adult ‘news values’ or ideas about newsworthiness (1997: 124). Similarly, English and co-authors argue that ‘human interest’ is the most prominent news value displayed in children's news (2019: 82), a notable contrast to adult news where conflict and proximity usually dominate (Harcup and O’Neill, 2017). These changes to the presentation of news with a child audience in mind are informed by, but also contribute to, a cultural construction of childhood (Buckingham, 1997; English et al., 2019), and Matthews (2007) argues that such conceptions of the audience can lead to a simplification of environmental topics. This indicates that while environmental issues may be considered especially ‘newsworthy’ for children, journalists do not always frame them in ways that encourage deeper environmental literacy or an active, informed response to planetary problems.
Investigating such transformations to environmental news for child audiences, this paper contributes to and also draws from work in the field of ecomedia studies, which examines popular mediations of environmental concerns (Cubitt, 2006) as well as the materiality and environmental impact of media objects, industries, and practices (Ivakhiv and López, 2024). As Ivakhiv and López explain, ecomedia ‘perform and do things that are ecological’ (2024: 23), and in this sense, all media are ecomedia due to their environmental impact, but there can be explicit and implicit ecological expressions in media texts. This article concentrates on explicit ecomedia or ‘those ecomedia openly portraying environmental themes’ (Ivakhiv and López, 2024: 22), and is therefore concerned with the ‘mindprint’ or ‘cultural footprint’ of children's news rather than its carbon footprint (López, 2014; Towe et al., 2020). My ultimate interest lies in children's environmental news as a configuration of cultural meaning about ‘children’ and ‘nature’. Borrowing a phrase from Buckingham, I am also taking media texts to be ‘non-human actors’ (2019: 286) with an important role to play in shaping the contours of the people/nature relationship.
Methodology
This study sought to determine how ‘the environment’ is depicted in children's news programs. To meet this research objective, a case study approach was adopted. Case study analysis gathers detailed, specific, concrete knowledge about a phenomenon through the in-depth exploration of examples (Flyvbjerg, 2006; Yin, 2009). The Australian children's news program Behind the News, also known as ‘BTN’, was chosen as the primary case study for this project. BTN is a prominent and longstanding source of news for Australian children that has been produced by the public broadcaster, the ABC, since 1968 and that has been identified by children in Australia as their most frequently watched news program (Notley et al., 2020: 30). The program offers a daily, five-to-ten-minute video news package for pre-teen children (aged 8–13) entitled BTN Newsbreak. These videos are available digitally and on-demand via the BTN YouTube Channel, the program's website, and the ABC's on-demand service ABC iView. BTN is designed to be watched in primary-school classrooms and to facilitate in-class discussion (Beveridge, 2009), and a longer edition, BTN Classroom, is released each week with this purpose in mind. From January 2023, a variation of the program for older children, BTN High, was launched. For the purposes of this study, which concerns itself with pre-teen audiences, BTN High was excluded from the analysis, which focused instead on episodes of BTN Newsbreak and BTN Classroom.
In a formula that has remained relatively unchanged across its long history, BTN mixes the serious conventions of television news with a childlike sense of fun and play in order to ‘spark’ children's interest in current affairs (Balanzategui et al., 2021: 58) while encouraging them to ‘critically analyse the world around them’ (Beveridge, 2009: 75). In this way, the program trains children in the habits of news consumption while also applying a child's eye view to global and local events. BTN shares notable features with other children's news programs and factual media, including thematic rather than episodic framing in order to explain and contextualise newsworthy events (Buckingham, 1997: 126) and a peer-to-peer, questioning mode of address to reduce the distance between text and audience (Bruti and Manca, 2019: 198–199). It can be located as part of the ‘edutainment’ genre, which Buckingham and Scanlon (2001: 282) define as ‘a hybrid mix of education and entertainment that relies heavily on visual material, on narrative or game-like formats, and on more informal, less didactic styles of address’. Following these conventions, each episode of BTN involves a news-like format with an anchor, direct-to-camera reports from journalists in the field, and interviews with expert sources – but, at times, the episodes also include humour, storytelling, comedy skits, and creative visualisations, with frequent use of metaphor, play, and fantasy as explanatory devices.
This study focused on environmental stories that featured in BTN Newsbreak and/or BTN Classroom within a three-year period from January 2023 to December 2025. News texts were collected from the BTN website using the search terms ‘climate change’, ‘environment’, ‘sustainability’, and ‘nature’. As titles of stories were not always indicative of environmental content, a full-text review was used to exclude news texts that did not report on an environment-related issue or topic, or did so in a manner that was deemed too brief for meaningful analysis. For example, stories about non-human animals were only retained for analysis if they covered conservation, biodiversity, pollution, or climate impacts as opposed to stories where animals were included for humour, cuteness, or shock value, or where the emphasis was on animal behaviour without any reference to specific environmental issues. This process revealed that BTN reports on a range of environmental topics, including conservation, climate change, pollution, biodiversity, sustainable living, and climate-related disasters. Where stories featured in both BTN Newsbreak and BTN Classroom, only one instance of the story was retained for analysis. Importantly, while stories about natural hazards and extreme weather events did not in themselves meet the inclusion criteria, the screening process revealed frequent mention of climate change in disaster-related stories, and such stories were retained for analysis. The result was a sample of 97 news stories, and these were subjected to a framing analysis to determine patterns of meaning-making. The goal of the analysis was to identify and unpack the most prominent frames used in BTN's coverage of environmental issues, rather than to produce a list of possible frames.
Framing analysis can be both inductive or deductive, although as Semetko and Valkenburg (2000: 94) point out, inductive approaches to analysing frames can be labour-intensive and difficult to replicate because they require the researcher to reveal an array of possible frames from the news texts themselves with only loosely defined preconceptions of such frames. Referring specifically to the framing of climate change, Nisbet (2010: 73) points out that researchers who take an inductive approach have a tendency to ‘reinvent the wheel’ by creating their own set of frames rather than relying on those already identified in literature, resulting in inconsistency and a limited ability to track and measure trends. Nevertheless, an inductive approach suited this study because I did not want to assume that environmental issues would be framed for children exactly as they are for adults. To this end, I followed Nisbet's (2010: 51) direction and used a mix of inductive and deductive approaches, allowing frames to be detected in the sample while also acknowledging and using frames discussed in existing research, drawing especially on the work of Guenther et al. (2024) whose systematic literature review identifies 18 frames specific to climate journalism, the most common being climate action, harmful impacts, responsibility and accountability, conflict, and climate justice.
Because the goal of this article was to identify and discuss the most prominent frames used in children's environmental news, rather than to reveal the array of possible frames, the discussion that follows will focus specifically on three frames that appeared in the sample far more than any others: environmental stewardship, curiosity and wonder, and crisis and emergency. The prominence of these three frames within the sample was significant: the environmental stewardship frame appeared in 26% of the stories analysed, with curiosity and wonder similarly placed at 25%, and crisis and emergency appearing in 21% of the news texts. Other frames identified included human responsibility (10%) and child or youth empowerment (5%). Notably, given the aforementioned trends in environmental news for adults, a climate action frame was detected but was only found to be present in 4% of the sample; similarly, only 3% of the analysed stories were found to employ a political conflict frame. Given this discrepancy between the prevalent and less common frames, and in order to make space for in-depth discussion, the following sections will focus on and unpack the three most prominent frames.
Environmental stewardship
Environmental stewardship describes the actions taken by individuals or groups to protect, care for, or responsibly use the natural environment (Bennett et al., 2018). The ‘environmental stewardship’ frame thus emphasises care for and protection of non-human animals, plants, ecosystems, areas of wilderness, and local environments, and it was the most prevalent frame identified in the sample. Environmental stewardship is an old frame in children's culture, the production of which has long been informed by a belief that it is not only acceptable but desirable for children to want to care for and protect the natural world and its non-human inhabitants (Bell, 2014). Children's nature magazines, for example, have been incorporating themes of environmental stewardship since the 1960s (Plevin, 2004).
Many of BTN's stories with an environmental stewardship frame reported on conservation-related topics. For example, the story ‘Molly the Turtle Released’ (27 November 2025) follows the rescue of an injured sea turtle and her subsequent release into the wild. Care for nature was also expressed through the language and behaviour of the reporters and their interviewees. For example, in the story ‘Threatened Species Day’ (8 September 2025), the endangered gang-gang cockatoo Is affectionately described by the reporter as a ‘beloved beaked buddy’, while in the story ‘SA Algal Bloom’ (28 July 2025) one of the child interviewees articulates a caring perspective towards marine animals impacted by agricultural pollution and global warming through the words, ‘we need to learn how to actually keep the ocean safe and keep the animals safe because they have a life too’. Animal perspectives and experiences are made salient in such stories, which do not go so far as to use non-human animals as sources (Freeman et al., 2011) but which nevertheless evoke a sense of environmental sensitivity, defined by Hungerford and Volk as ‘an empathetic perspective toward the environment’ (1990: 261) and identified by Roth (1992: 9) as an important aspect of environmental literacy.
When the environmental stewardship frame was present, children were often depicted as actors or agents and/or used as sources: young people were shown engaging in a range of pro-environmental behaviours from cleaning up rubbish to planting trees to taking prize-winning photographs of animals. For example, the story ‘Young Conservationists’ (12 August 2024) focuses on the role of young people in species survival and features interviews with teenage members of South Australia's Youth Environment Council. Older than BTN's child audience but younger than the scientists and academic experts who were found to be the dominant sources in conservation-related stories, these teenagers articulate environmental stewardship as well as youth empowerment through phrases like ‘my local environment is very important to me because I’ve grown up here … I see the importance that each ecosystem has’. From an ecolinguistics perspective, such language normalises and cultivates respect and care for the natural world (Stibbe, 2015: 2). This also aligns with Chawla's suggestion that ‘pro-environmental behaviour is related to an ecological or environmental identity, which forms when people identify with nature and consider caring for it an important aspect of their self-concept’ (2009: 6). As expressed by these young environmentalists – and by the story that features them – caring for nature can also be part of a generational identity.
This depiction of childhood agency was common across the sample when the environmental stewardship frame was active. Importantly, though, childhood agency was often made salient in an uncomplicated manner, without regard for the different, nuanced ways in which such agency may be achieved or performed. As Buckingham argues, representations of childhood agency are not always ‘for’ child audiences: he writes, ‘The agency of children is sometimes celebrated [by adults] … as a source of hope for the future’ and ‘adults often invest their fantasies in the figure of the child who will right the wrongs they themselves have committed’ (2019: 287). While BTN is made for children, its depiction of child agency tells us much about adult desires and imaginings of childhood in a time of ecological crisis, in the sense that environmental stewardship is perceived to be an easy and accessible ‘action’ or ‘identity’ for young people to adopt, potentially even an easy solution or balm in the face of anthropogenic environmental woes.
The environmental stewardship frame created story structures where positive endings were likely, and this inclination towards positivity and hope may explain its prevalence in the sample – after all, ‘happy endings’ are commonly understood to be a feature of children's storytelling. Indeed, as Van Der Molen and De Vries (2003) have pointed out, the production of news for children often involves ‘consolation strategies’ whereby efforts are made to reduce anxiety and assure the child audience that everything will be alright. Such consolation strategies are arguably at play in these framing practices, where stewardship and conservation dominate the environmental news landscape for children. At the same time, recent work on environmental communication has shown that positivity can be effective at enabling audiences (of all ages) to engage with environmental problems in a way that is energising and productive (Chadwick, 2015; McAfee et al., 2019). The environmental stewardship stories in this study also followed a ‘constructive journalism’ approach (McIntyre and Gyldensted, 2017) and depicted solutions-work and/or the application of knowledge in order to find solutions, aligning with radical new patterns in mainstream news reporting. We should therefore not dismiss positivity itself as a ‘simplification’ of environmental issues, acknowledging that narratives of environmental stewardship can also be transformative acts that reduce the distance between human and non-human.
Curiosity and wonder
Within the ‘curiosity and wonder’ frame, the second-most dominant frame in the sample, children were positioned as inherently curious viewers of non-human nature, their relationship with the natural world governed by fascination and a sense of wonder. Curiosity is best defined as an inclination to ask questions or seek information, constituted by what Zurn (2021: 12) calls ‘a series of investigative practices’. For Foucault, curiosity ‘evokes care … a sharpened sense of reality … [and] a readiness to find what surrounds us strange and odd’ (2013: 319). In the context of environmental news, curiosity is a frame that trains the gaze onto creatures, places, and issues in ways that emphasise their newness and strangeness. For example, this frame was detected in a story about insects as a future food (‘Eating Insects’, 29 July 2024) that made salient the bizarreness as well as the innovativeness of eating insects as a pro-environmental act. The curiosity frame was also identified in stories that rendered the natural world as ‘wondrous’. This frame therefore depended heavily upon visual devices such as sweeping shots of majestic natural landscapes. Not restricted to positive stories about the beauty or strangeness of nature, the curiosity frame was found to be present in a range of stories about potentially upsetting issues like climate change, where young audiences were encouraged to look at environmental crises through curious eyes. In particular, endangered and/or unusual animal species were used as gateways to explore the impacts of climate change on ecosystems. For example, the story ‘Ocean Census’ (17 March 2025), which explains the impact of global warming on marine life, is anchored in the depiction of a shark species which the reporter introduces with words designed to evoke fascination: For a very long time, this shark was a nobody, in that nobody had ever seen her, nobody had even uttered her name … You see, no one actually knows that much about what's down here.
A significant element of the curiosity frame was its emphasis on learning and, specifically, vocabulary-building. When wonder and curiosity were evoked, time was often taken to explain, define, contextualise, and render usable scientific and/or political terms, from ‘food security’ to ‘greenwashing’ to ‘coral bleaching’. Indeed, many of the wonder/curiosity stories took the form of an ‘explainer’, falling within a genre of journalism where background information is given to help audiences make sense of an issue or event that is receiving attention in the news cycle. Curiosity was also depicted as an environmental virtue that the adult reporters embodied and modelled for their young viewers through a questioning or ‘interested’ approach. For example, in the story ‘Evolution and Biodiversity’ (12 August 2024), the reporter uses phrases like ‘let's go find out’ and ‘I still have a few more questions’ to engage the young audience in scientific explanations. At times, curiosity was also depicted as a physical and emplaced action. For example, the story ‘Bogong Moth Tracker’ (4 November 2024), about a citizen science initiative to track the bogong moth's annual migration to alpine Australia, begins with a skit in which the reporter models curiosity by searching for the moths in darkness with a torch. It is soon revealed that the reporter is foolishly conducting her search in the studio: the story's expert source, a science communicator, interrupts and explains, ‘You’re probably going to have better luck finding a bogong moth outside at night – not here in the ABC studio’, whereupon the reporter relocates the audience outdoors-in-nature as the story continues. Here, curiosity is offered as the first step in crossing the crucial and otherwise impassable barrier between screen media (indoors) and nature experiences (outdoors).
Curiosity is not typically a frame we would expect to find in adult news stories about environmental issues. As with ‘environmental stewardship’, there is a historical connection here to the broader sphere of children's literature and culture. As Bell notes, many early literary texts for children assumed that young readers had ‘an inherent love of the natural world’ (2014: 38), a disposition that Adkins refers to as the ‘natural curiosity’ of children and ‘their special ways of learning about the world’ (2004: 31). Locating children's news within this context, we can surmise that curiosity is sometimes deemed by adult media-makers to be a ‘safe’ and inherently ‘childlike’ position from which young people might read, interpret, and respond to environmental topics. The dominance of this frame also indicates that curiosity is considered (by adults) to be one of the primary markers of a healthy relationship between child and nature in the context of environmental crisis. However, this frame and its associated reading of the child audience does not necessarily empower children. Indeed, curiosity can evoke a mythic image of the innocent child, who is more an object for adults than a subject in its own right (Jenkins, 1998; Kincaid, 1998). As Zurn points out, ‘the contours of who is curious, when, and how reflect the differential allocation of power’ (2021: 2), and in this context, we might propose that childhood curiosity is the act or position of being attentive (and subservient) to adult wisdom. Zurn adds that curiosity can, at its best, ‘awaken and mobilise’ but it can also ‘fetishize and objectify’ (2021: 2), and as a frame in children's environmental news it therefore comes with the risk of fetishising both the natural world and the ‘curious child’ itself.
Crisis and emergency
While wonder, curiosity, and environmental stewardship are themes that hinge upon what we might call a positive or healthy relationship between people and planet, other stories in the sample presented a ‘crisis and emergency’ frame – indeed, this was the third most prevalent frame detected in the data. A crisis and emergency frame pays attention to the looming threat of environmental problems and often incorporates the crisis-oriented discourse of political actors. As Nisbet explains, crisis framing emerged from the discursive practices of environmentalists in the late 20th century and relies upon ‘depictions of specific climate impacts, including hurricane devastation, polar bears perched precariously on shrinking ice floes, scorched, drought-stricken earth, blazing wild fires, and famous cities or landmarks under water due to future sea-level rise’ (2010: 55). Feldman and Hart (2021) remind us that environmental journalism in the 21st century incorporated a discursive shift towards crisis and emergency, a framing practice that reflects the language of scientists and experts but also, interestingly, that of young climate activists. BTN used a crisis and emergency frame when reporting on a range of issues relating to climate change and its impacts. For example, one story reported on extreme heat and the United Nations' pronouncement of a ‘new era of global boiling’ (‘Global Boiling’, 7 August 2023) while another covered the dire health of Australia's Great Barrier Reef and the impact of warming ocean temperatures on marine ecosystems (‘Reef Report’, 9 September 2024). In such stories, ecological damage, decline, and catastrophe were foregrounded as defining aspects of the people/nature relationship, and young audiences were positioned as witnesses to the reality of climate change.
Unlike the previous two frames discussed in this article, the crisis/emergency frame is not easily described as child-friendly. Indeed, children's ecomedia has in the past been hesitant about depicting the climate emergency, or climate change more broadly, which is understood to be ‘boring, difficult and confusing’ (Smith et al., 2014: 6) and full of ‘doom and gloom’ connotations (Samuelsson et al., 2008). Only a handful of years ago, at the time of writing, the potentially upsetting and perplexing nature of climate change had led to avoidance by children's media-makers and a profound ‘climate silence’ in children's culture (Kamenetz et al., 2022). A significant result of this study is that ‘climate silence’ was not a prevailing feature of BTN and its coverage of the environment. Interestingly, too, it is within the crisis/emergency frame that we find the most strikingly transformative aspects of children's news at work, with the makers of BTN taking an adult-centric frame and adapting it – making it safe and suitable – for a child audience.
Such adaptation involved multiple strategies, including the use of child-friendly language and an imagined peer-to-peer mode of address where the youthful journalists spoke to children as children would speak. This discursive transformation is evident in a story about the release of Australia's first National Climate Risk Assessment (‘Climate Risk Assessment’, 15 September 2025), which the journalist describes in childlike terms as ‘basically a big look into how Australia's climate is changing’. While explaining to the young audience that the report found 63 nationally significant climate risks, the story bounces between the language used at a press conference by Australia's Minister for Climate Change, Chris Bowen, and the more direct and child-centric language of the reporter: ‘there isn’t an Australian individual for whom [climate change] impacts won’t be real’, Bowen states somberly, while the reporter lightens the mood by acknowledging ‘this may be feeling a bit doomy and gloomy’. Here, the reporter becomes not so much a protective shield but a gateway, allowing the child viewer mediated access to the severity of the issue. When crisis and emergency was active as a frame, language was also used to invite, manage, and make space for affective responses to environmental problems – including grief, sadness, and worry. Specifically, when the crisis frame was present children were directly addressed by the reporters with gentle, conversational phrases like ‘the news isn’t great’, ‘it sounds pretty intense’, and ‘yeah – it's a lot’ – spoken acts of making-space in efforts not to soften or reduce the emotional impacts of the stories but to acknowledge and accommodate them.
Child-friendly language was important in all stories using the crisis/emergency frame, but so was the construction of a childlike ‘way of seeing’. While BTN made the environmental crisis visible to and see-able by children, it did not demand that the young audience simply look at the crisis as adults would see it. For example, in the story ‘Plastic Treaty’ (11 August 2025), which covers a global treaty to curb plastic pollution, the adult sources speak in ways that emphasise crisis and urgency: ‘We find plastics everywhere we look’, implores a scientist, ‘from the deepest ocean trenches up to the Himalayan mountains’, while a spokesperson from the UN Environment Program states ‘The impacts are here and now, and we have to stop this from spiralling out of control’. The reporter, in contrast, speaks in ways that not only address the audience as (imagined) peers but also activate a child's world and a child's way of seeing the world: It's hard to imagine a world without plastic in it, especially when so many everyday items contain some kind of plastic, like containers, bags, utensils, toys, electronics, clothes, building materials, sports equipment, and … [picking up an object] whatever this thing is.
Discussion and conclusion
In a time of ecological emergency, journalists are important environmental communicators and mediators of the people/nature relationship. This includes adult journalists creating or presenting environmental content for children. Brüggemann and Engesser have described climate journalists as ‘key mediators between the sphere of science and the public sphere’ (2014: 400), and similarly, when it comes to children's environmental news, journalists become mediators between the ‘spheres’ of childhood, nature, and adult discourse about environmental science. Made visible by the above analysis, these mediating practices contribute to the transformation of children's news into ‘explicit’ ecomedia (Ivakhiv and López, 2024: 22).
The mediating relationship between people and planet discussed in this article is unique because it approaches, or grapples with, a gap between communicator and audience. In other words, the news texts under study here differ from mainstream or adult news because they are not made by the same people who constitute their intended audience. Such a gap between adult communicator and child audience defines children's literature and media (Buckingham, 1996; Rose, 1984), and is significant here because it requires the communicator to ‘imagine’ the child audience – call them to mind, creatively evoke them and their unique ways of seeing – while also ‘reimagining’ the environment itself. Framing, in this case, is a transformational act, and we can detect the imprint of such re/imagining practices in the news texts themselves.
As Lakoff (2010) argues, it matters how we frame the environment – and echoing Lakoff, I propose that it matters how we frame the environment for children. In this article, I have therefore been interested in the often surprising ways in which environmental meanings are articulated, enabled, and transformed in children's news. Ultimately, this study found the environment to be framed in children's news as an object worthy of protection but also, at times, a complex being or entity with rights and intrinsic value. Altogether, the identified frames were a mix of what we might call ‘environment-specific’ and ‘child-specific’ – that is, some of the frames discussed above (e.g. crisis and emergency) we would expect to see in environmental news for adults and align with conventional ways of reporting on environmental problems, while others (e.g. wonder and curiosity) can be more firmly located within the conventions and history of children's culture. This indicates that children's environmental news is a meeting point where ways of thinking about children intersect with ways of thinking about environmental crisis. It also indicates that there are manifold influences on journalists who create environmental content for children, from the broader sphere of children's culture and literature to longstanding ideas about childhood innocence to journalistic practices that emphasise crisis and emergency – and, indeed, to the crisis-oriented discourse of young environmental activists themselves. Perhaps most importantly, the stories analysed above indicate that it is no longer normative practice for communicators to consider childhood as a sphere that is separate from or ‘outside’ the sphere of the climate emergency.
Limitations of this study include its focus on a specific program and on the textual meanings produced by children's news. This study, therefore, paves the way for future research into the practices and perceptions of both adult journalists and child audiences in the context of environmental news. An analysis of the framing patterns in children's environmental news gives us insight into how adult communicators perceive child audiences in the context of the climate emergency, but it also reveals many of the problems and possibilities surrounding environmental communication for children. The problems arise when communicators diminish, objectify, or fetishise young audiences and their supposedly inherent curiosity and affection for the natural world. An inscribed audience is visible in the news texts analysed above, and this construction of the ‘ideal’ child is imbued with ideas relating to nature-connectedness, curiosity, and hope; it is an agentic construction but one in which children's modes and means of relating to the environment still involve the presence of adult gatekeepers, and in which children themselves as signifiers of hope become one of the most important meanings produced by environmental texts. The possibilities, in turn, can be glimpsed in the strategies of transformation and reimagining that these stories sometimes display. In particular, humour, fantasy, and playfulness are creative and non-traditional strategies that tend to transform an issue, creating new ‘openings’ in environmental communication through which complex ideas can be viewed and approached.
Overall, crafting a child's eye view of environmental problems involves a tension between showing and hiding, empowering and protecting: an ongoing negotiation (and sometimes, a contestation) of ideas about what should be seen by ‘young eyes’ and what should not. These mediating practices are not just protective, nor are they wholly constituted by simplification. Indeed, this study has shown that such crafting of a child's perspective is a nuanced and highly creative act on the part of adult communicators. Children are not an easy audience to create environmental content for – they exemplify the notion that environmental communication must be inventive, targeted, and audience-centric (Boykoff, 2019; Callison, 2014). Children's media, in turn, can do far more than inform young audiences about environmental issues or ‘inoculate’ them against climate misinformation and other types of harmful environmental messaging (Van Der Linden et al., 2017). As this study has shown, children's media can also bring ‘the environment’ to life, create proximity to environmental problems, cultivate environmental literacy, and mediate affective responses to the climate emergency.
Footnotes
Ethical approval
There are no human participants in this article, and informed consent is not required.
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Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Data availability statement
The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are not publicly available but are available from the corresponding author on request.