Showing puberty: overcoming the taboo in children’s television

Abstract

This article examines how non-fiction children’s television programmes portray bodily changes and sexuality at puberty. Engaging with the body and the sexuality of children in the broadcast media raises cultural and social challenges. Public concern about social morality and the ‘sexualisation of children’, sexual objectification and pornography, together with the construction of childhood as a naïve pre-sexual stage of life, have silenced children’s television when it comes to the subject of children’s sexuality. However, a few programmes have offered an alternative to this taboo. Based on a study of 30 non-fiction programmes submitted between 1964 and 2016 to Prix Jeunesse international festival for children’s media, this paper describes and analyses how these programmes present unique, thought-provoking and innovative ways of engaging with the culturally controversial issue of the body and sexuality on children’s television.

Keywords:

• Children’s television
• puberty
• sexuality education
• bodily representation
• non-fiction programmes

Acknowledgements

I thank the Prix Jeunesse international festival and, especially Kirsten Schneid, for her help in this study. Special thanks go also to Maya Götz, head of Prix Jeunesse International for her helpful comments and guidance.

Notes

1. For references to all cited programmes, see Table 1.

2. The physical changes in puberty analysed were: penises, spontaneous erections and wet dreams, hair growth, breast growth, menstruation and masturbation.

3. What Kids Want to Know about Sex and Growing Up was a television special for 8–12-year-olds. For details of the formative research that preceded the programme, see Sroka, Richman, and Bartick (1993).

4. Other episodes in the series may have dealt with masturbation but were not selected for submission to the festival, like the Norwegian programme Puberty (2016), which dealt with masturbation in episode 8 named ‘What’s the deal with puberty’.