Is the Portrayal of Children in the News Moving Us Toward a Collective Sense of Responsibility?

Kids are having their media moment. Whether focusing on the effects of the pandemic on child development and mental health, the debate over masks in school, child poverty, or climate change, the news media are covering children’s issues in ways that we have not seen for many years. For those of us advocating for kids, this is fantastic and long overdue. Although having kids in the spotlight is great, we also need to consider how they are presented. Are these issues being positioned in ways that will move our society toward considering the best interests of children in all our decisions? Will this coverage push us toward a sense of collective responsibility for ensuring that every child reaches their full potential?

Today, we released the third report from our Framing a New Narrative for Our Kids project, which has been generously supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Children’s Hospital Association. The first report, Why Aren’t Kids a Policy Priority? The Cultural Mindsets and Attitudes that Keep Kids off the Public Agenda, describes the cultural mindsets and attitudes that keep kids out of our public discourse and off our public policy agenda. The second report, How Are Advocates Talking about Children’s Issues? An Analysis of Field Communications, discusses how advocates are currently framing kids’ issues and suggests ways that our cultural mindsets might be interacting with these frames to hinder the effectiveness of their advocacy efforts. Our current report, How Are Children’s Issues Portrayed in the News? A Media Content Analysis, examines the frames embedded in news media—past and present—and offers recommendations that advocates can use to navigate these narratives.

One historical example with some real parallels to our current environment is the history of child labor in the United States. It is hard to imagine, but at the turn of the 20th century, 18 percent of the US workforce was younger than 16 years of age. The children in the workforce at that time were mainly from poor, rural, immigrant families. Although advocates worked for decades on this issue, historians give much of the credit for the eventual ban on child labor to photojournalist Lewis Hine, who spent decades photographing child laborers. Thousands of these images were published in newspapers and magazines across the country, pushing the public and elected officials to act. A federal ban on child labor was finally passed in 1938.

This report suggests ways to frame the hard work of our colleagues in journalism so that it has the same powerful impact on kids’ lives that Lewis Hine’s work did a century ago. The grandchildren of the kids in Lewis Hine’s photographs are not working in factories today because he and others told their stories in ways that generated public action. Let’s find a way to do that again.

Download a copy of the report: How Are Children’s Issues Portrayed in the News? A Media Content Analysis.