Children today grow up in a world of wall-to-wall media. This is true across racial and ethnic groups; true for kids growing up in cities and suburbs and rural areas; true across income levels. Despite the fact that there are many different types of media from which to choose in 2018, television remains an important media platform — especially for younger children.

With the rising prevalence of digital media consumption via tablet and mobile device, children are consuming television programming more than ever before. Consider the following statistics:

• The many new ways to watch TV–on the Internet, cell phones, and iPods–actually led to an increase in total TV consumption from 3:51 to 4:29 per day among children 8-18 

• Because they spend so much of that time ‘media multitasking’ (using more than one medium at a time), kids actually manage to pack a total of 10 hours and 45 minutes (10:45) worth of media content into those 7½ hours.

• There are substantial differences in children’s media use between members of various ethnic and racial groups.  Black and Hispanic children consume nearly 4½ hours more media daily (13:00 of total media exposure for Hispanics, 12:59 for Blacks, and 8:36 for Whites).  Some of the largest differences are in TV viewing: Black children spend nearly 6 hours and Hispanics just under 5½ hours, compared to roughly 3½ hours a day for White youth.

• More than 70 percent of children ages 8 to 18 have TVs in their bedrooms, according to the University of Michigan Health System. More than 35 percent have cable or satellite-TV access. 

• The American Academy of Pediatrics suggests that while “in 1970, children began to regularly watch TV at 4 years of age, whereas today, children begin interacting with digital media at 4 months of age.”

In short, children are exposed to a lot of media content.

But what is it that they are seeing?

For many years, researchers have found disparities between the racial, ethnic, and gender demographics in the world of children’s television compared to the racial, ethnic, and gender demographics in our actual population. Content analysis work has consistently found not only vast underrepresentation of characters of color and female characters, but also significant differences in the roles they play and in their portrayal.

Our own work at the CTV Project has tracked representations of race, ethnicity, gender, and age in some of the most popular children’s television shows over a number of years. In addition to coding characters for the ways in which they are drawn, we utilize sociolinguistic analysis to assess how the characters actually sound.

Bottom line: we have found that the number of characters of color has improved over time, as has the number of female characters. However, this improvement is predominantly stemming from one network (PBS), and isolated to specific genres of animated programming. In addition, we have found that there are significant differences in the ways that heroes and villains talk: to a very great extent, the “bad guys” have non-American accents.

As we continue to track trends in character representation on children’s television, we have started to assess why it is that stereotyping persists by interviewing many of those involved in its creation — from writers to producers to voice actors. Ultimately, we hope to investigate what the effects of exposure to this programming are on young children.