I’ve Got a Girl Crush: Parents’ Responses to Stories about Sexuality in Children’s Television

ABSTRACT

People harbor unique biases about the relative influence of popular media on themselves compared to others. Broadly, they expect others to experience greater harm from exposure to negative depictions (e.g., violent content) and to derive fewer benefits from exposure to positive depictions (e.g., educational content). The current experiment examined if these biases impact how parents monitor their children’s television exposure, specifically programs about same-sex attraction. Parents (N = 702) watched a cartoon about a young girl who expresses romantic interest in another girl. Although biases emerged with regard to parents’ beliefs that this content would harm or benefit their own (vs. other) children, these biases did not influence their monitoring intentions. Instead, parents with conservative (vs. liberal) attitudes perceived the show as more threatening and less valuable for all children, which enhanced their desire to criticize, restrict, and censor that content.

KEYWORDS:

• Children’s media
• first-person effect
• LGBQ representation
• parental mediation
• third-person effect

Acknowledgments

There are no acknowledgements for this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability

The dataset and syntax used for analysis is available at https://osf.io/3pjey/