This project builds on my doctoral research on media representations of childhood in Turkey in the 1980s and 1990s. The focus is on the constructions of childhood in the local contexts of Britain and Turkey, which emerged in response to shared global processes of this period, and I aim to analyse how ideas about childhood travel, and are appropriated and re-contextualised, with impacts on the status of children and childhood.
Globally, the 1980s and 1990s were a period characterised with the erosion of traditional safety nets, increased inequality, and social insecurity. This global transformation echoed differently in different localities. For instance in Britain, these were decades of deindustrialisation, soaring unemployment, welfare retrenchment, and at the same time, family and household structures were significantly transformed, and cultural tensions surfaced with the rise of civil and social movements. In Turkey, the period was marked by the 1980 coup d’état that cleared the way for uncontested economic restructuring. This included increasing privatisation of health and education, deterioration of income distribution, and the emergence of new living standards for people from different social strata. These were also the years when voluntary and forced migration transferred Turkey’s great urban-rural gap into crammed city centres.
It was in this context when, the loss of childhood “as we know it” had been a recurring theme in popular Turkish and British national newspapers. This project raises several questions about how these texts framed the “disappearance of childhood.” What was meant by “loss of childhood,” and which childhood/whose childhood was perceived to be lost, and for which reasons? What do these tell us about how childhood is defined, and who is considered to be a child?
The analysis builds on data collected by various methods, including systematic sampling and keyword searches. In addition to perusing the paper archives of Hürriyet, and Tercüman, Türkiye and Milliyet newspapers from Turkey, which represent different political perspectives, an archival research was conducted the digital archives of British newspapers, including the tabloids Daily Mail and Daily Mirror and the broadsheet newspapers The Daily Telegraph, The Times, The Guardian, and The Independent, which again have different political affiliations. The digital format allowed keyword searches (initially with the phrase “disappearance of childhood”) which was followed by subsequent searches with keywords and phrases that came up frequently.
It was found that newspapers offered different interpretations of what aspect of childhood was disappearing and why. There were news reports about how children spent their daily lives, what played, ate, drank, and wore, how they related to adults, and how adults related to them. Most importantly, almost all of these reports were presented with the journalistic style and tactics of the 80s and 90s, with sensational headlines, deliberately controversial comments and exaggerated impressions. It is argued that these years were marked by episodes of intense worry about childhood.
The analysis focuses on some of the central themes and trends, as well as similarities and differences between Turkey and Britain. It was found that the news coverage about children was marked by moral panics on five related but distinct themes. These are: Children’s Culture, Consumption, Generational Hierarchy, Parenting, Children’s Time.
Looking back at the moral panics of the 1990s, it is argued that they stemmed from real worries about real children, and expressed a genuine frustration and helplessness, albeit in a very emotional way. It is observed that most of these pieces framed the transformation of childhood as a symptom of unwelcome social change – but since change was specific to localities, so were the worries about that change.
Many of the examples implied very specific concerns about children, such as the economisation of childhood and the integration of children in market logic. For example, there was an apparent unease with children being responsibilised with constantly investing in themselves, which in terms of political economy can be seen as children being positioned as neoliberal citizens in the making. However, these worries remained largely decontextualised: and the causes for these changes were usually identified as cultural, technological, even spatial rather than social or political. As a result, these very valid concerns often appeared to be a vague worry at the face of change, and came across an ambiguous, and slightly unreasonable fear of the new and mourning for the old.
In conclusion, the analysis suggests that these pieces were part of a contest to specify which aspects of childhood were to be valued and held on to, and reveals the need for a more nuanced understanding of representations of changing childhoods in the 1980s and 1990s.
