Parental Pedagogies: An Analysis of British ‘Edutainment’ Magazines for Young Children

Abstract

As the UK government places a growing emphasis on the importance of learning in the home, commercial companies are increasingly targeting the educational aspirations of parents.This article offers a critical analysis of a range of ‘edutainment’ magazines aimed at pre-school children, most of which are based on children’s television programmes and characters. It describes the expansion of this market in the context of the broader commercialization of children’s media culture and the growth in cross-media merchandising. It then provides an analysis of the educational rhetoric of the magazines, as embodied in their sales pitches and pedagogic advice to parents. Finally, the pedagogic strategies of the magazines are analysed through an account of their mode of address and their positioning of the child reader.The article suggests that many of the magazines are informed by a reductive and disciplinary conception of learning, combined with an apparently contradictory emphasis on entertainment and ‘fun’–a combination which, it suggests, may be symptomatic of contemporary changes in the forms and sites of learning.