From Snow White to Digimon

Parents, educators and social commentators have repeatedly claimed that passive media consumption can harm children. Building on recent attempts to understand how children actively interpret media, the authors use an interpretive model of socialization to analyze fieldnote excerpts from a Taiwanese kindergarten and first grade. Contrary to popular opinion, the findings demonstrate that young children did not simply internalize and reproduce the messages received from media or adult authority figures. Instead the authors found that children actively incorporated popular media into their peer cultures through knowledge displays, play planning episodes and collective play. Further, the children in this study used popular media to enact, explore and resist the Confucian values of being a good student, a good family member and a good peer.