During a recent sickness recovery I came across this show called Horseland, and it’s your typical little girl show: unrealistically-colored horses, tween girls and extraneous talking animal characters. The show apparently aims to teach kids things like ‘don’t judge the rich girl by her limo’ and ‘don’t piss off the blind girl by treating her like she was just born yesterday.’ The show has an “educational/informative” label haphazardly slapped upon it, but it’s quite obvious that the main goal of the show is to entertain that young, horse-obsessed type we all knew (or were) back in the 6th grade with a romanticized perspective on horse ownership.
So how exactly “educational/informative” are kids’ shows with this aforementioned label? Is there proof that children somehow “do better” when they watch shows that preach moral values than shows that simply provide pure entertainment (excluding shows with negative impact, like violence or sexual content), or is this just a load of horsefeathers?
**Bonus question: What is the purpose of teaching morals to children through such a medium as tv? Are these teachings supposed to patch up any possible holes in a child’s pre-kindergarten education? They’d have to be fairly big holes and, personally, I would have to recommend a little visit from Mr. Social Worker if a kid grew up not knowing they shouldn’t make fun of other people. But perhaps they’re meant as starting points for discussions between children and their parents/guardians? OR, at the risk of playing the pessimist, is this a method employed by show producers to simply keep their shows in good standing with tv stations and get higher ratings and more money?
Well, it’s not limited to kids shows - you see plenty of that crap in “adult” entertainment as well. “Dad realizes he spends too much time at work and not enough time with the family.” “Happiness isn’t about being great/rich/powerful, it’s about friends (and, yes, family.)” “War is a bad thing.” Etc, etc etc.
I don’t know of any scientific studies on this - it would be almost impossible to study anyway given the fact that people get moral messages from so many different sources on an continual basis.
I’d say the value of these things is as an invitation to evaluate your life. The invitation itself isn’t the valuable thing because you can always ignore it, but if it prompts you to take the time to think about things, the thinking is valuable.
So maybe a kid sees the show and thinks “They sure were mean to that one kid. I was mean to a kid the other day. I should treat that kid better tomorrow.” then something comes out of it. Pretty much all kids already know that being mean is bad, so the show hasn’t really taught anything useful.
Of course… watching colorful horsies on TV is a great way to avoid thinking, so the shows might be doing more harm than good. If I was a parent, I’d insist that after every show, the TV be turned off for long enough to analyze what we just saw and how we could apply it to life. Not only would my kids be able to master essay writing by age 5, but I’d hopefully get more quiet time out of it.
Does anyone else love the fact that every episode of The Clone Wars opens with a simplistic moral “You cannot climb the mountain until you believe you can!”.
While the show itself gets kids to identify with a slave driving republic that uses humans for cannon fodder? They go through a slow moral downfall either personally(Anakin) or as a whole, towards the end doing end runs around government by hiring criminals to act as proxy fighters to maintain official neutrality so war crimes too? Hey kids today we have a special guest mr Oliver North
I love the show and love the moral ambiguity, probably was a mistake to target children.
I read about one study for preschoolers, using the show Arthur (which I don’t like anyway because is he a rabbit or what? Ugh.). The “lesson” was about being nice to your siblings. What the researchers found is that small children who watched the show were just as likely to see “don’t be nice” as the take-away, the theory being that preschool-aged children don’t get the narrative structure of showing a problem (being mean to the little sister) leading to a lesson (be nice). From the kids’ point of view, the show presented two options that aren’t particularly related to each other, being mean and being nice, and as far as the kids were concerned, it was apples and oranges. The related issue is that with the attention span of the average preschooler, they are paying closer attention at the beginning of the show, when the problem behavior is being presented, and not as much attention by the end when the lesson rolls around.
This made me think about how many books my toddler has that teach some sort of lesson about a problem we don’t even have yet. The little puppy who is afraid of the dark! The little bunny who doesn’t want to share her toys! Now when I read them, I make up other stories to go with the pictures, why even give her the idea that one MIGHT BE afraid of the dark if it hasn’t occurred to her yet?
What kind of morals did stories have before Aesop? “It’s okay to cheat your brother out of his birthright if God unfathomably favors you.” “If you’re serious about war, it’s okay to kill your enemies’ wives and infants and claim their virgin daughters as your wives.” I’m not too worried about Horseland.
There’s nothing NECESSARILY wrong with a children’s story or TV show imparting a message… but it’s almost always obvious when the message came first and the whole story was written around that message.
Kids can see such messages coming a mile away, and they tune out quickly once they realize, “This is one of those stories that’s supposed to teach me a Very Important Lesson.”
Any lesson a writer hopes to impart had BETTER be delivered in the context of a compelling story with characters we care about.
The most basic, fundamental, and easy-to-write story in the world is one where the protagonist overcomes some obstacle and comes out changed. This is the basic plot of nearly everything with a plot. Nobody is going to write a kid’s show where the hero overcomes an obstacle and comes out a complete jerk, so the plots tend to naturally shape up as the protagonist dong something and becoming a better person for it.
It’s just easy writing. Moral ambiguity and complexity is hard, and being obviously immoral isn’t going to sell. It’s easiest just to tack an easy simple feel-good story to your excuse to draw horses.
Congratulations on never having encountered Shin-chan.
Thou art wise. My brothers weren’t afraid of the water until Mom made them afraid of it so they’d stay at her side when we went to the public pool… and then we had the hardest time getting them to bathe, because “I coul’ drown! On’ wanna drown! Waaaaaaaaaah!”
Persuasion works best when you don’t know you are being persuade. The obvious moral messages are easy to ignore because the audience knows the TV show is trying to teach them something.
What we should be more worried about are the messages TV shows teach children that are not obvious. So while you are focusing on the moral message of Horseland, the child is focusing on what the girls of Horseland look like. Are they normal looking girls? No they’re not. Like most shows about girls, they are all skinny, have great fitting clothes, and the black girl has white girl hair.
Every kids show that teaches children “morals,” also teaches then something more sinister, usually something that will have mommy reaching for her credit card as she’s walking through Macy’s with her daughter who wants to buy all sorts of consumer goods that will make her look like a Horseland girl.
The mother will wonder who taught her little girl to want to be prettier and blonder, and the answer will be that TV show she did not worry about because it had that nice moral message at the end that distracted her from everything else it taught.
This is good point on which we should really think on this as TV is the most important medium to increase awareness and thinking process towards good things.
I’ve always thought the idea was to reinforce ideas rather than teach. If a child (or adult) hears a moral dictum from a parent, and then it is repeated at school, at the religious-and/or-social institution(s)-of-your-choice, and on TV, then there’s a better chance the child will accept it as a social norm.
