Constructions of knowledge and childhood: Addressing current affairs with children with a focus on parents’ practices and children’s news media

Abstract

This paper examines the ways in which current affairs related to diversity and difference, nationally and globally, are represented to Australian children in children’s digital news media and through family discussions. The discussion is based on qualitative research that explores parents’ views and practices in addressing news media and diversity and difference issues with their children. In addition, this project includes a discursive analysis of stories found in Behind The News (BTN), the primary digital news media source for Australian children, aged 8–13 years, from 2015–2018. The news stories are related to three significant topics: the marriage equality debate, refugees and terrorism. Within feminist post-structuralist, post-developmentalist and critical theorist frameworks, a focus is given to examining the dominant discourses that prevail in the stories, which provide insight into how childhood and children’s access to certain types of knowledge is viewed and regulated through media and family practices. Drawing on thematic and Foucaultian discursive analyses, the pilot study findings demonstrate that children’s news media is closely scrutinised and regulated, with major news stories framed within dominant discourses of childhood innocence, as well as the agenda and particular interests of the producers of children’s new media. These topics, which have dominated news in recent years, are frequently considered by some adults as inappropriate or difficult topics to discuss with children.

Introduction

Contemporary childhood in western societies is intensely governed through legislation, policies and everyday social practices, not just influencing how childhood is experienced, but also how children are raised and educated (Davies and Robinson, 2010; Rose, 1989). This is especially so in terms of children’s access to particular types of knowledge, which can be subject to strict surveillance and censorship. This regulation is largely underpinned by dominant western discourses of childhood, framed within developmentalist perspectives, rendering certain knowledge such as sexuality, war and death, for example, as more appropriate for adults than children (Robinson, 2013; Silin, 1995). The discourse of childhood innocence, inherent in dominant discourses of childhood, reinforces this perspective. Some adults strive to protect children from what they perceive to be ‘difficult knowledge’ in order to prolong children’s state of innocence for as long as possible (Corteen and Scraton, 1997; Robinson, 2013; Robinson and Jones Díaz, 2016; Silin, 1995). Children’s access to knowledge of sexuality is one area that is highly contested and regulated. Addressing same-sex relationships in early childhood education, for example, has resulted in moral panic in Australia. Young people’s sexuality education in many countries (e.g. Australia, UK, USA) reflects the anxieties that some adults have in this area of education, resulting in parenting and schooling practices that strictly regulate what information is provided to children formally in schools and informally in families (Robinson et al., 2017). Addressing climate change with children has become another area of stress for some Australian parents, who fear this information would unduly result in children’s increased anxiety.

Based on a review of Behind The News (BTN), the primary Australian children’s news media source, and interviews and focus groups with parents of children in early childhood education, this paper examines how dominant discourses of childhood impact on how current affairs are discussed with children. In particular, three significant current affairs topics are explored: same-sex marriage equality, refugees and terrorism, all of which have been a major focus in Australian mainstream media in recent years. Several core issues are discussed in this paper. First, parents’ reluctance to address current affairs issues such as same-sex marriage equality, refugees and terrorism with their children is largely underpinned by discourses of childhood innocence and child development, resulting in parents’ concerns that these topics are neither appropriate nor safe for children. Second, children’s news media does not generally address current affairs with children in early childhood (0–8 years of age), viewing them as less cognitively capable of engaging with this information (Alon-Tirosh, 2017; Lemish, 1997). Third, dominant discourses of developmentalism and childhood innocence, as well as dominant community values, also determine what topics are discussed with children and how they are approached in children’s news media. BTN is particularly sensitive to public opinion and scrutiny since it is government funded. How BTN approaches children’s news, particularly stories perceived as being controversial, requires negotiating not just government and management values, policies and practices, but also broader community perspectives of childhood and children’s early education. BTN is thus always alert to the potential consequences of breaching conservative community values about children’s access to knowledge, including being caught in a moral panic (Robinson, 2008, 2013; Taylor, 2007), resulting in the possible loss of its funding. Robinson (2013) argues that moral panic, especially in relation to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer (LGBTQ) issues, is utilised as a political tool by conservatives, and children are core to this agenda.

Children come from a broad range of diverse family, socio-cultural, economic, and political backgrounds in which they encounter and negotiate numerous experiences in their everyday lives. Children generally are also living in an era in which escaping local, national and global current affairs is virtually impossible, despite attempts to keep this information from them. Children, in various ways across different ages, are active and agentic citizens, trying to make sense of the world they live in and the news they encounter. Research shows that children are widely exposed to what is considered by many as ‘adult’ news (Carter, 2013; Kaziaj and Van Bauwel, 2017). Within this context, discourses of protection shift somewhat to concerns about mitigating the effects of this exposure in order for children to feel positive about the world. It is argued in this discussion that children’s access to critical, evidence-based reporting of current affairs, in a manner that scaffolds the building of their knowledge and critical literacy skills, should be core to the early childhood education curriculum.

The research approach

This discussion on addressing current affairs with children is framed primarily within feminist post-structuralist, post-developmentalist and critical theoretical perspectives. These theories provide critical lenses through which to critique universalising approaches to childhood that do not adequately address the social, cultural, economic and political differences that exist in children’s lives. Both perspectives offer a means for understanding relationships of power and how subjectivities and identities are constituted in binary relationships, including adult/child, which are steeped in discourses of inequalities (Robinson and Jones Díaz, 2016; St. Pierre, 2000; Weedon, 1997).

The discussion in this paper addresses firstly a component of a pilot study exploring early childhood educators’ perceptions, policies, pedagogies and practices on diversity, difference and social justice in early childhood education, and secondly parents’ perceptions of these issues and the practices they employ in addressing these areas with their children. An additional focus was on how current affairs related to diversity and difference are addressed with children by parents and children’s news media sources.

This mixed methods pilot research was conducted across six early childhood education settings in metropolitan and regional areas. It incorporated a case study, an interpretive approach using interviews, focus groups, participant observations and field notes to capture the variations, contradictions and fluidity of the different pedagogical practices and family experiences associated with diversity and difference. There were nine interviews with educators (directors, teachers, practitioners and playgroup workers), and three focus groups involving seven parents and three educators (a total of 19 participants). Key to this research was investigating how questions of diversity and difference are addressed in highly urbanised, superdiverse, heterogeneous regions in Western Sydney compared to more homogeneous regional areas of NSW, Australia.

The questions in both the interviews and focus groups pertained to three key areas, including: (a) the impact of contemporary social issues on the lives of children and families in view of how children understood, perceived and responded to issues relating to marginalisation, inequality, disadvantage, diversity and difference; (b) how discourses of contemporary global issues are constructed in news media and by educators, families and children; and (c) how early childhood education settings addressed these issues in pedagogy, policy and practices in terms of how educators understood ‘superdiversity’ in relation to multiculturalism, indigeneity, refugee and asylum seekers, gender and sexual diversity. This also included their understandings of equity, economic disadvantage and globalisation, and the extent to which these strategies were informed by Belonging, Being and Becoming: The Early Years Learning Framework Australia (Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEEWR), 2009).

A review of BTN was undertaken from 2015 to 2018. This review specifically covered stories associated with several key diversity and difference issues (gender, sexuality, refugees, terrorism and indigeneity). The discussion in this paper addresses three of these areas: sexuality, refugees and terrorism. The three areas were chosen as being core issues to contemporary Australian and global politics at the time of the research.

A Foucaultian discourse analysis was applied to the interviews, focus groups, observations and review of children’s news media. A frequency count was also conducted on the number of stories associated with the current affairs topics chosen for review. A Foucaultian discourse analysis is an examination of the relationships between the various discourses identified, the function they perform and the subjective positioning of educators, children and families in pedagogical practice (Mullet, 2018; Ussher and Perz, 2018). This analytical method provides an approach to understanding the relationship between language, knowledge, ideology and power (Lupton, 1992).

Ethics approval was granted for this research by the Human Research Ethics Committee of the researchers’ university (Ethics number HR12055). Pseudonyms are used for all participants’ names in this paper.

Children’s news media

BTN, like other national and international children’s news media sources, tends to target children aged eight years and over. Creators of children’s news primarily view young children through discourses of child development that constitute children as a homogeneous audience, lacking the cognitive ability and background knowledge perceived of older news consumer audiences (Alon-Tirosh, 2017). There are few studies focusing on children under eight years of age and their experiences of media or news media specifically. Lemish’s (1987, 1997) research on the media literacy of children under seven years of age and on how babies become television viewers is an exception to this. Framed in developmental psychology, Lemish (1997) points out that children in this age group are viewed as having difficulties understanding storylines and characters, and the relationship between television and reality. Lemish adds that this perceived developmental process is largely inferred from older children rather than from direct studies with younger children.

Similar to the content of other digital children’s news media, the stories most frequently included in BTN are human-interest stories focusing on animals, the environment, sport, science, space, music, technology, health and youth culture. BTN does address some important contemporary issues with young people, in relation to refugees, Indigenous Australians, marriage equality, and violence against women and children. Moral panic has often arisen when these topics have been addressed with children. Recent examples of moral panic connected with border control, refugees, asylum seekers, Islamophobia and immigration, fuelled by emotive media debates, have not only constructed superdiverse Sydney suburbs as ‘hotbeds of Jihadism’ (Morgan, 2014: 1), but also perpetuated a normalised and permanent state of alarm where refugees and asylum seekers are equated with Muslim terrorists. This is part of a broader global moral panic over fundamentalist Islam essentially demonising all people of Middle Eastern origin and/or appearance (Martin, 2015).

These controversial and political topics are far less common than more human-interest stories, but they are given some focus as children and young people are likely to encounter these stories in mainstream news media. The stories are often presented as a means of counteracting the perceived potential impact of children hearing certain ‘scary’ stories (a term used by one BTN commentator) through mainstream news media.

Addressing LGBTQ issues and marriage equality in ‘Behind The News’

There were very few stories (six in total out of approximately 900) in BTN over the four years examined (2015–2018) that had some focus on LGBTQ issues. In fact, there were no stories that specifically focused on gender diverse or transgender issues over this timeframe. This was despite these being particularly topical in mainstream media, including a public debate about addressing these issues in schools in order to counteract the stigma, harassment and marginalisation experienced by transgender and gender diverse students. When LGBTQ issues were mentioned, they were often included briefly in stories more generally on bullying in schools. There was one story that covered the history of the annual Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. In this story, the historical political roots of the Mardi Gras celebration were addressed, and overall, the story was a positive portrayal of LGBTQ people’s increasing acceptance, reflected through the Mardi Gras celebrations.

One of the most extensively covered and controversial news media issues in Australia in recent times has been marriage equality for same-sex couples and the national postal vote that was held in 2017 to determine Australians’ opinions on the topic. The marriage equality debate was highly contested by church groups and conservative politicians. BTN had three stories on this topic. The first story was titled ‘Plebiscite or Vote?’ Interestingly, this story begins with the image of two placards painted by a child, one with the words ‘Vote Beach’ with a drawing of a beach and sun; the other with the words ‘Vote Zoo’ and a child’s drawing of an elephant. The story focuses on the process of a plebiscite, which is explained through children’s enactment of a classroom debate around making a decision on the location of the excursion for that year – the beach or the zoo. The focus on processes, children’s enactment of such, and giving general historical examples, not necessarily associated with the issues at hand, is a common approach in BTN. Although this approach is considered more developmentally appropriate and relevant to children’s experiences, it does not address the fundamental issues of marriage equality, discrimination and inequality, losing an opportunity, or a teachable moment, to discuss these points with young people. The story, through its lack of focus on the marriage equality issues, inadvertently reinforces the discourse that LGBTQ issues and marriage equality are not appropriate points of discussion with children and young people (Robinson and Jones Díaz, 2016; Robinson et al., 2017).

Of particular interest is that this story begins and ends with images of heterosexual couples getting married and kissing, shifting the core focus away from same-sex couples, who were not depicted kissing at all in this story. These images reinforce the privilege associated with heterosexual marriages, including the public showing of affection, and the discursive constitution of these relationships as natural and normal. The absence of similar representations of same-sex couples depicts a lack of social acceptance for these relationships, for the public showing of affection, especially in the context of children, and reinforces the lack of legitimacy of the relationships that the kiss represents. Research highlights the significance that children place on marriage and kissing as a means of legitimating relationships and a reflection of love (Robinson and Davies, 2015).

The second story on marriage equality explained the shift in process from a plebiscite to a non-compulsory postal vote and why this was the case, then pointed out the differences between them. This story once again relied on a description of processes, not a discussion of the foundational issues relevant to the marriage equality debate based on a non-compulsory national vote. The third and final story focused on the result of the postal vote, which was in favour of changing the laws to include same-sex marriage. Interestingly, this story did show same-sex couples publicly embracing and kissing in celebration – perhaps a recognition of the greater legitimacy that the postal vote results gave to same-sex relationships. However, like the two previous stories, this one also centred on the process and development of young people’s knowledge of government. The fact that the result of the postal vote was not legally binding meant the final decision on marriage equality was left up to parliamentarians in the Senate and House of Representatives, not the Australian people. The story pointed out that after much debate amongst parliamentarians about the wording and conditions of the new law, such as allowing for religious exemptions for ministers marrying same-sex couples, marriage equality was passed through the Australian parliament with the majority of votes. Consequently, the discourse that same-sex marriage is less legitimate, despite the recognition of these marriages in the revised Marriage Act, was reinforced.

LGBTQ issues and marriage equality in family discussions with children

The discourses that prevailed in children’s digital news media were also reflected in family discussions and practices with children. The marriage equality debate in Australia was reaching a peak at the time we undertook interviews, focus groups and observational data in the early childhood education settings that participated in the research. Given the extensive media coverage of the marriage equality debate, we found little evidence that LGBTQ issues relevant to this debate were being addressed with children and families across the research sites. However, the findings do suggest that the settings with the highest number of families and children from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds (CALD) tended to be more reluctant to address these issues with children. This resonates with McAllister and Snagovsky’s (2018) study, which highlighted the most prominent ‘no’ vote in the Australian marriage equality postal vote came from electorates in Australia with large proportions of immigrant voters.

In the extract below, Nancy, a CALD parent, reflected on her perceived complexity of same-sex marriage for her children ¹ :

My kids . . . they are so young . . . so these things are going to be big issues for them to understand. But I never talk with them, or we never talk with them like this thing, that thing. We just talk with them like the studies they are studying, we are reading books.

Discourses of developmentalism are represented in the parent’s views about how she interacts with her children around issues that she perceives to be too difficult for them to understand. Nancy’s remark ‘they are so young . . . these things are . . . big issues for them to understand’ illustrates how developmentalism constructs a binary logic of children’s worlds versus adults’ worlds as distinctively separate, often mutually exclusive social spaces through which power relations between adults and children are maintained and reinforced (Robinson and Jones Díaz, 2016). The parent has limited expectations that her children are capable of understanding about same-sex marriage, and prefers to avoid the issue entirely by remaining focused on her children’s academic pursuits.

Below, Sara talks about how she has addressed her child’s questions about same-sex relationships:

We have some friends, two ladies, who have a son by a sperm donor and I guess

Mila hasn’t really thought much of it, although one day she did ask me how come he has two mums and I guess I just said, well, sometimes two women really love each other and they decide to have a child. That was it and she basically said, ‘yeah, okay’. Yeah, that was it. That was the last of it . . . I don’t watch the news in front of the children, so they . . . I guess they don’t really know that it’s happening.

Sara’s perception that her child knows little about same-sex relationships is in contrast to her child’s curiosity: ‘one day she did ask me how come he has two mums’. Sara’s approach to addressing these issues with Mila reflects a concern that drawing too much attention to same-sex relationships could be problematic. This is further evidenced by Sara’s remark, ‘I don’t watch the news in front of the children’. While Sara appears to have a relaxed attitude about talking to Mila regarding same-sex relationships, this remark about not watching the news with her children highlights a contradiction in her perception of what Mila is able to observe from direct experience with other families, despite her children’s limited exposure to the media. Sara’s remark ‘that was the last of it’ closes down the possibility of any potential ongoing conversations with Mila, despite her child’s everyday experiences with and exposure to relationships with family, friends and media regarding same-sex relationships.

Addressing refugee issues and Islamophobia in ‘Behind The News’

From 2015–2018 there were 26 stories (out of approximately 900) that had some relevance to war, refugees, Islam and terrorism in BTN. Two key themes emerged from the review of these stories: silences around the impact of Islamophobia in children’s lives, and restricting children’s access to difficult knowledge. Not surprisingly, these stories predominantly focused on positive or good news stories about refugees, including: a special day for refugees; Australia increasing its refugee intake; refugee sports; the refugee Olympic team; spotlighting a Syrian refugee family; and children raising funds for refugees.

One story, titled ‘Brussels Terror’, addressed the terrorist attacks in Brussels in 2016. The main discourse underpinning this story was there was no need to panic as police, counter-terrorists and powerful countries like the US, UK and Australia have these terrorist situations under control and the impact is minimal on the majority of people’s lives – children continue to go to school and family life goes on as usual. The reassurances come from statements of solidarity from powerful world leaders, as well as from safe and happy children. This story ends with the news commentator suggesting that the story could be ‘scary’ and ‘overwhelming’ for children, so directs children to the ‘upsetting news page’ on the BTN website. The discourses that underpin the messages on this page include: stories are in the news because they don’t happen often; news stories show the most shocking of what happens; images of support are harder to find and are therefore rarer in the news; good people are always there helping; it is important to share your feelings and ask questions; and talking about it will make you feel better. Despite highlighting the importance of talking about difficult topics, again this story provided limited or no discussion of the critical issues related to terrorism that contribute to these ongoing events. Reassuring children that public safety is a core aim of governments and security services is important, but enhancing young people’s knowledge and understandings of the issues that contribute to these events can support building children’s awareness and counteract the discourses that lead to the public fear, prejudice and stereotypes that abound about minority groups perceived to be associated with these events.

A 2016 story on refugees, titled ‘Nauru Kids’, points out to BTN readers the current Australian government position on refugees – those who want to come to Australia as refugees, including children, are not always accepted, especially those who come to Australia via ways considered illegal by the government. This political stance is relayed through the experiences of two girls, aged 13 and 17, who have fled with their mother and grandmother from their homeland of Burma by boat (run by ‘illegal people smugglers’) as a result of fearing for their lives in the conflict between Muslims and Buddhists. Despite attempts to normalise the girls’ lives in detention through schooling, the uncertainty, precariousness of their situation, environment in which they live and lack of safety they feel send a strong message that their lives are far from normal. The discourse that detention centres are not happy, safe or healthy environments reinforces the government message that ‘illegal’ attempts to enter Australia do not end well, even for children.

Silences around the impact of Islamophobia in children’s lives

In this research there were silences around issues of Islamophobia in children’s lives as constructed in the media (including news media). This was evident in how the parents understood the impact of these issues on children. In one of the focus groups located in Greater Western Sydney, where there is a large Arabic-speaking population, the impact of Islamophobia on children was mostly silenced in the pursuit of childhood innocence and developmentalism. In the extract below, Josephine reflects on how she protects her child from coverage of terrorism, war and famine the Middle East:

Especially now when they have got a lot of coverage about . . . terrorism, and um shootings and a war in Syria and famine in another Middle Eastern country. And there is nothing to smile about. I would prefer my 11-year-old to . . . watch a football . . . or . . . soccer . . . or a basketball game.

Josephine’s preference for her child to engage in sports media, rather than news media, is perhaps an avoidance strategy informed by discourses of childhood innocence and protection through which constructions of children as happy, innocent and naive are perpetuated and reproduced. Her concerns for the prospect that her child could be exposed to ‘terrorism . . . war . . . and famine’, as reported in news media, is expressed by her preference. The conversation continues and Josephine is asked about how her children would deal with exposure to issues in the media without her mediation. In her reply, she reflects on the personal impact of ISIS on her family:

I will tell you why we stopped watching the news and news programmes. Um, in Lebanon at the time um a cousin of mine was fighting ISIS on the border. And it became . . . who is ISIS? Why is ISIS? Why is there fighting? And . . . I had to put a stop to it and I said no.

For Josephine, rather than engage in a critical and informative conversation with her children about ISIS, her approach was to ‘put a stop to it’, perhaps as a way to silence their curiosity. However, when asked about how she responded to her children’s persistent questions, there was as a sense that she experienced an uneasiness in having conversations with her children regarding ISIS and terrorism. Her response is that of caution:

It [the explanation] had to be very basic, because I mean my son was only eight or nine at the time, so it had to be very basic and you have to make a conscious decision where if you sow a seed of hate and fear that is what you are going to get . . .. So, what am I going to say to my son? Because we are Christians they want to kill us? No. These are bad people that don’t fear God, we fear God; that is why we respect [others]. And we love people because we want people to love us. That’s how I answered him. And from then on that was it.

Notwithstanding the personal impact of ISIS on her family, Josephine’s resolve to limit the explanations to the very basics highlights her discomfort in addressing these issues with her children. Her cautious approach is influenced by her perception that talking about ISIS could incite hatred in her children towards Muslims. Despite this, she did address ISIS with her children by drawing on religious discourses, ‘these are bad people that don’t fear God, we fear God; that is why we respect [others]’, as a means of containing her children’s questioning.

Abdel-Fadil (2019: 12) argues that the role of affect in mediatised conflicts of religion is significant in understanding how the role of emotions in religious conflicts and identity politics is often the very fabric of which political ideas are made. She asserts that while scholars, journalists and the community have discussed the content of religious conflict, there is less attention paid to ‘the intensities of feeling generated among differing collectivities when religion become a focal point in public controversies’. She calls for a theorisation of affect building on decades of grounded anthropological, postcolonial, feminist and queer scholarship of emotion in demonstrating that ‘emotions are an integral part of everyday politics, and that affect is inseparable from social and political interactions’ (2019: 12). In Josephine’s approach to addressing her children’s understandings of the mediatised conflict of ISIS and terrorisim, the politics of fear and moral justifications for othering is encapsulated. As stated by Abdel-Fadil (2019: 24): ‘[r]eligious emotion may fuel intricate processes of othering and provide the moral justification for turning against others in an attempt to “save oneself” from a perceived threat of demise’. She argues that the performativity of affect (what emotions do) is deeply connected to the construction of political subjectivity, and the ways in which affect is performed in religious and identity conflicts is key to understanding how emotions give a sense of belonging to certain groups while simultaneously exerting opposition towards others. In this process, ‘emotions fuel identities, worldviews, and their contestations, that is at the heart of . . . the politics of affect’ (2019: 13). This is evident in Josephine’s comments: ‘So, what am I going to say to my son? Because we are Christians they want to kill us?’

Children’s access to difficult knowledge

In the focus group, the parents were asked about what they know about children’s news media, such as BTN. Josephine expressed her approval of this programme. She remarked:

My son last year was introduced to that (BTN) at school and he was nine. Um, yeah that didn’t bother me because yes, he needs to be exposed to an extent and that’s given him enough. A level that he understands what is going on but he doesn’t need to know the gory details or the politics behind it or . . . so yeah, I don’t mind things like that.

Alon-Tirosh (2012) argues that assumptions regarding children’s knowledge, cognitive abilities and interest in news media position children’s understanding of such issues as less developed than adults’ understanding. However, Carter et al. (2009) note that children do indeed demonstrate interest in immigration, war, fair trade, animal testing and politics (to name a few). Still, in discourses of childhood innocence children are positioned as innocent and vulnerable and therefore are often seen as needing protection from ‘the news’. The discourse of childhood innocence is mobilised to regulate children’s access to information considered more appropriate for adults (Robinson, 2013). This mobilisation is congruent with Alon-Tirosh’s (2017) research investigating news creators’ perceptions of childhood and children’s news media where ‘children should be protected from highly emotional coverage and presented with a calmer news format that is less likely to be harmful’ (2017: 144). Josephine’s preference for the coverage of news events to be sanitised and presented in ways that protect her children from the unpleasant realities that are produced by politics, ‘. . . he doesn’t need to know the gory details or the politics behind it’, is congruent with Alon-Tirosh’s findings cautioning that ‘children’s news does not harm or scare children or threaten their “innocent, optimistic world”’ (2017: 143).

In the extract below, when asked about children’s awareness of difference in view of the media’s negative portrayal of asylum seekers, Sara reflects on her daughter’s sensitivity to these issues:

Well, once again, we don’t watch the news in front of the kids. I catch up on Facebook, which is a good way to not show them, but, yeah, we just have lots of friends from different backgrounds and just normalise it and I also feel that that’s a bit too heavy at this age to – I think kids in the four-year-old group can actually get quite emotional about things as well, things that they don’t understand. I feel like Mila especially, she’s quite sensitive that she might actually feel quite . . .

Sara seems to have conflated the media’s portrayal of asylum seekers with her children’s exposure to diversity. Having ‘lots of friends from different backgrounds’ appears to be a sufficient way to ‘normalise’ diversity, yet not watching the news in front of her children, even though she catches up with it on Facebook, is her strategy to protect Mila from the news coverage of diversity with respect to asylum seekers. Sara’s rationale for this is informed by discourses of developmentalism, which universalises children’s learning and behaviour within linear and singular categories based on ‘ages and stages’ (James et al., 1998; Robinson, 2013; Robinson and Jones Díaz, 2016). Sara has aligned her daughter’s emotional development with her cognitive development: ‘I think kids in the four-year- old group can actually get quite emotional about things as well, things that they don’t understand’. Her specific concerns for Mila’s sensitivity around these issues further highlight adults’ discomfort in addressing difficult topics with children.

Like Sara, Onida rarely watches the news. She claims, ‘I hardly watch the news, but I wouldn’t watch it in front of Harley necessarily. Sometimes I have actually’. This highlights her positioning in discourses of censorship as a way of controlling her child’s access to difficult knowledge, rather than engage in critical conversations with Harley about the media’s portrayal of contemporary issues. Onida’s confession ‘sometimes I have actually’ suggests a contradictory stance in her news media practices with her children.

Conclusion

Despite the research literature highlighting the significance of critical thinking with children through pedagogies of critical literacy that focus on deconstructing power relationships, stereotypes and the discursive constructions of gender, ‘race’, sexuality, violence and consumerism in popular media and digital culture (see for example Comber, 2001; Jones Díaz et al., 2007; Marsh, 2005; Vasquez, 2014), it is yet to critically highlight the importance of critical media literacy that acknowledges the persuasive influence of news media narratives, bias and representations of contemporary global issues.

Given the global rise of authoritarian leaders, popularism and intolerance, and the impact these issues have on children, families and communities, the pedagogical implications for how educators work with families are significant. Issues relating to refugees and asylum seekers, same-sex relationships and Islamophobia highlighted in this discussion have particular relevance and significance to early childhood educators, parents and children. These issues form news media content and narratives on a daily basis, through the ‘24-hour news cycle’. Consequently, their work brings them into direct contact with children and families whose lives are shaped by many of these issues.

Mascheroni et al. (2014) argue that media representations not only influence public policy and research agendas, but also indirectly shape and mould discursive contexts in which parents, children, teachers and policy makers operate when addressing contemporary issues. Therefore, for parents and children, moving beyond developmentalism and discourses of childhood innocence enables the recognition that children do indeed have the capacity to absorb ‘difficult knowledge’ and the pervasiveness of news media narratives and representations. Mendoza (2009) argues that parental intervention in children’s media consumption may strengthen children’s media literacy skills in critically thinking about the media messages they receive and create. As children’s media consumption also includes children’s news media, parental intervention also involves engaging with children on a daily basis in everyday conversations about news events. This requires an openness and willingness to explore difficult topics with children by scaffolding their understandings of contemporary global issues, rather than leaving children to mediate their own understanding of such issues. Similarly, educators can encourage children to critique the normalisation of violence reported in news events through conversations that critically highlight alternatives to violence in resolving conflict. Educators can also critically deconstruct with children misrepresentations of minority groups through conversations about racism, Islamophobia, gender inequality, transphobia and homophobia represented in the media more broadly.

This paper has highlighted how the regulation and censorship of children’s knowledge of issues reported in news media narratives and children’s news media is reinforced through discourses of childhood innocence and child developmentalism. Drawing on feminist post-structuralist, post-developmentalist and critical theorist frameworks, parents’ perspectives of the impact of global contemporary issues as reported in the media have been examined in view of the contradictions and complexities in their approach to addressing these issues with their children. Further, a discursive analysis of stories reported in BTN of perceived difficult topics relating to marriage equality, refugees and terrorism demonstrates ways in which children’s news media is constructed to shift the focus away from issues pertaining to human rights, equity and social justice.