Children and Media: A Global Perspective

Children and Media is the definitive overview of the intersection of children and media, which provides a sweeping picture of the field from the accumulated interdisciplinary and global literature of the past 60 years. The text is a comprehensive integration of different theoretical traditions and research practices, and one of the only books on the market to cover both critical qualitative and quantitative approaches to the topic. It brings together developmental psychology, cultural studies, sociology of childhood and health studies, among others, providing an understanding of the roles media have in the changing nature of childhoods around the world. Lemish covers the entire scope of media that children are exposed to, including television, internet, video games and mobile media. With a distinctively international and accessible approach, Children and Media balances the need to contextualize media in children’s lives in their unique cultural spaces, as well as searching for universal understandings that hold true for children and youth around the world. In so doing, it avoids a judgemental approach as to whether media are good or bad for children, and instead focuses on their unique uses, roles, and meanings in children’s everyday lives, offering readers a thorough understanding of the nature of today’s childhoods.

Dafna Lemish is Professor of Communication and Dean at Southern University of Illinois, Carbondale, and founding editor of the Journal of Children and Media . An ICA fellow, she is author and editor of numerous books and articles on children, media and gender representations including most recently: The Routledge International Handbook on Children, Adolescents and Media (2013), Screening Gender on Children’s Television: The Views of Producers around the World (2010), and Children and Television: Global Perspectives (Wiley–Blackwell 2007).