1980's-1990's

Music Videos:

This video is the perfect example of the loss of innocence in children's media. Britney Spears was a pop icon and a role model for young girls. The images that she sends young girls is provocative and sexual, which is something previous time periods steered clear from. She is doing promiscuous dance moves and with every outfit in the video has on a belly shirt. This sends young girls the message that to be successful and popular you have to look like this. It also sends young boys a message that girls are supposed to be skinny and have loose morals.

Cartoon:

Rugrats is part of the beautiful thing that was 90's cartoons. It centered around babies and showed more real life characters. Everything did not always turn out okay for everybody and that was always fine because that's how life is. It was a show about young kids, for young kids which made it more relatible for the kids watching. It also showed the importance of good relationships between families. It was not quite like the shows from previous time periods with straight forward lessons for children but it also was not as inappropriate as a lot of the other media that was beginning to come out for young kids.

Journalism:

This article shows the paranoia that parents were beginning to have towards what their children were watching. The show was starting to be more about who it could sell itself to than what was actually being put on the screen for kids to watch. It had no educational purposes, the characters did not even speak English, and there was no stimulus for children. There was a lot of different controversies within the show because of parents finding out the triangle that Tinky Winky had on his head meant he was gay, there was translated gibberish that claimed Po said "faggot" during the show.