The Children Are Watching Us. Exploring Audiovisual Content for Children

Audiovisual content for children and young people has always been a very important sector within the creative industries from an economic and social perspective. For this reason, early mass communication theories already addressed the not easy topic of the relationship between young people and the media, to which academic studies have continued to pay some attention, with increasing incidence in recent decades, evaluating it from various aspects. In fact, the media landscape in which we live offers the youngest viewers a wide range of products, which is even more difficult to monitor and circumscribe due to the way in which consumption times and practices have become jagged and fragmented, with the use of the newest and multiple technical devices. Reflection on this subject has seen various approaches adding to each other over time, according to a multidisciplinary perspective that traditionally besides media studies, sees also psychology and pedagogy as fundamental, moving along an axis ranging from theories on media effects to media education. In search of interpretative and analytical grids, more research has thus been done trying to define the traits of film and TV genres dedicated to children and young people and their educational, informative or entertainment purposes.