-
Teletubbies and the Conflict of the Romantic Concept of Childhood and the Realities of Postmodern Parenting
- University of Iowa Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
jan susina • Teletubbies and the Conflict of the Romantic Concept of Childhood and the Realities of Postmodern Parenting Teletubbies is the popular but controversial television program, developed by the BBC specifically for very young children, which ran from 1997 to 2001, first in England. The program was subsequently introduced a year later on PBS in the United States. This children’s television program both reintroduced and questioned some of the basic Romantic notions of childhood in the era of postmodern parenting. While the program has ceased production, Teletubbies has achieved an influential and lasting impact on children’s television and other forms of children’s screen media that are currently being created for very young children. Developed by Anne Wood and Andrew Davenport, Teletubbies completed production after 365 episodes in 2001 and was viewed in more than fifty countries. While Teletubbies is no longer in production, the children’s television program continues to be shown on various cable television channels in the United States, and many of the episodes are available on DVDs or videos. Designed specifically for toddlers and infants aged two and younger, Teletubbies created a firestorm of controversy when it first appeared on PBS in the United States in 1998. In 1999, the Committee of Public Education of the American Academy of Pediatrics issued “Media Education,” a policy statement that included the recommendation urging “parents to avoid television viewing for children under the age of 2 years” (341). While Teletubbies and the Conflict of the Romantic Concept 185 Teletubbies was not explicitly mentioned in the American Academy of Pediatrics policy statement, which was developed by its Committee on Public Education, it is clear that the popularity of the program, as the first and best-known television program to be designed specifically for very young children to be broadcast in the United States, was one of the chief motivations for the creation of the media education guidelines. Despite the widely publicized American Academy of Pediatrics media guidelines, the success of Teletubbies encouraged the development of more, rather than less, television programming for very young viewers and opened media development for other television programs, such as Blue’s Clues, Dora the Explorer, and Bear in the Big Blue House, which are all intended for the same demographic. Another well-publicized criticism of Teletubbies was raised when Jerry Falwell, then the spokesperson for the conservative Moral Majority, denounced the program in February 1999; he suggested that Tinky Winky, the largest of the Teletubby characters, was a homosexual role model for young children (Samburg). Despite criticisms from both progressive and conservative perspectives, Teletubbies became the first of an increasing number of television programs, DVDs, videos, computer games, and software apps created for very young children. In the Kaiser Family Foundation report Zero to Six: Electronic Media in the Lives of Infants, Toddlers and Preschoolers (2003), Victoria Rideout, Elizabeth Vandewater, and Ellen Wartella acknowledged “an explosion in electronic media marketed directly at the very youngest children of our society” that includes “a booming market of videotapes and DVDs aimed at infants one to 18 months, the launching of the first TV show specifically targeting children as young as 12 months” and “computer games and even special keyboard toppers for children as young as nine months old” (2). Teletubbies was both a groundbreaking and deeply troubling children’s program for many adults since it celebrated a Romantic concept of an innocent childhood while it simultaneously embraced the technological changes of childhood in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. As the pioneering television program intended for very young children, Teletubbies influenced children’s electronic media immensely. Zero to Six, which was released two years after the final regular airing of Teletubbies, observed that very young children, aged six months to six years, grow up in a world immersed in media. This study, based on random interviews of [54.211.203.45] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 12:47 GMT) 186 Jan Susina 1,000 parents and children, reports that according to parents, their children “spend an average of two hours a day with screen media, mostly TV and videos” (Rideout, Vandewater, and Wartella 12). American children spend about the same amount of time watching screen media (one hour and fifty-eight minutes) as do they spend playing outside (two hours and one minute), and three times as much time with screen media as they do reading or being read to (thirty-nine minutes) (Rideout, Vandewater, and Wartella 4). The American Academy of...