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.