“You’ll keep us safe/That’s who you are.” Police representations in children’s shows

by Shayna Maskell

Children between the ages of 2 and 4 years old spend two and a half hours watching television every day; those between 5- to 8-years old spend more than three hours daily watching, and nearly half (47%) watch more than the recommended two hours of television (Rideout & Robb, 2020; Sisson et al., 2009). Moreover, a majority of U.S. families (72%) have more subscriptions to television and video services (i.e. Hulu), and nearly half of 2-to-4 year olds and two-thirds of 5-8 year olds have their own smartphone or tablet (Rideout & Robb, 2020). Without a doubt, television—streamed or live—is the medium of choice for young children.

Television’s ubiquity and saturation in children’s lives has spurred decades of research into the behavioral, social, psychological, and developmental impact of such viewing. And while there are some contradictory findings, research has largely found that television acts as a significant part of children’s informal education (Fisch, 2014), offering knowledge through narrative structures (Samaniego & Pascual, 2007). Despite a handful of studies that have shown the watching high-quality educational content during preschool years, such as Sesame Street or Blue’s Clues, can improve children’s basic academic skills and help long-term academic performance (Baydar et al., 2008; Kostyrka-Allchorne, Cooper, & Simpson, 2017), most studies emphasize the negative outcomes of television on children, including

• having problems with executive functioning (Lillard & Peterson, 2011);
• less task-oriented, persistent, and autonomous learning behavior in the classroom (Pagani et al., 2010); and
• decreased sleep duration (Cespedes et al., 2010).

Most studies on children’s television focus on the content and consequences of advertising (Dalton et al., 2017; Jenkin et al., 2014). Those studies that do specifically target children’s television shows via sociocultural themes frequently analyze gender representations (Hentges & Case, 2013; Luther & Legg, 2010; Walsh & Leaper, 2020), finding that gender stereotypes are often reinforced with more boy characters overall. Even fewer studies look at representations of race (Keys, 2016; Klein & Shiffman, 2009; Peruta & Powers, 2017). Gender and race withstanding, there is a dearth of research on the content of children’s television shows, analyzing how such content may shape young people’s perceptions and understandings throughout childhood. This study, then, aims to join that vein of inquiry.

Most scholarly research into children’s television centers of race and gender.	This study focuses on shows from Nick Jr., a channel that targets children ages 2 through 6.

More specifically, here I analyze representations of police and policing in children’s shows targeted at young children ages three to five. The literature shows that while children younger than two years old seldom understand or pay attention to screen media (Richert et al., 2010), preschoolers display a variety of learning outcomes from different media (Puzio et al., 2022).

Using the top five most popular shows on Nickelodeon Jr.—Paw Patrol, Peppa Pig, The Adventures of Paddington, Blaze and the Monster Machines, and Bubble Guppies—this study found that animated children’s shows construct the police through four significant themes: as local authority, as role models/models of citizenship, as facilitators in a community, and as easily accessible and personable. Such representations condition growing children into the dominant ideology of neoliberalism and capitalism that undergirds inequalities. By naturalizing the assumption that police are an essential requirement of and for social order, these shows perpetuate police fetishism, bolster power imbalances, and ultimately ignore the marginalization of black and brown youth through a process of criminalization.

With over 120 episodes, Bubble Guppies was a favorite for preschoolers. (8) Blaze and the Monster Machines, with nine seasons, purported to focus on STEM for preschoolers through their show.

Media depictions of police and policing

Most public knowledge about crime and justice comes from media consumption (Surette, 2007), with stories about crime and justice making up one-fourth of all entertainment (Reiner, 2002). Indeed, between 2004 and 2005, one-third of the most popular shows on television were centered around crime (Phillips & Frost 2012). Within these copious narratives, the police habe been overwhelmingly portrayed as competent and helpful, specifically at solving crimes and arresting suspects successfully, thus fighting evil and upholding the moral status quo (Doyle, 2003; Surette, 2007). Despite a slew of shows featuring corrupt or rogue cops (The Shield, The Wire, City on a Hill, Low Winter Son, to name a few), the majority of shows construct cops and policing as positive; even when officers broke the rules, it was in pursuit of catching the “bad guys” and protecting society’s moral fabric (Dirikx et al., 2012).

Show like Law & Order SVU are extremely long running, cementing the image of cops in a positive light.	While not much research exists into policing and children’s shows, Kort-Butler has found the Justice League constructs the justice system as ineffective, corrupt, and that heroes are needed.

However, all this literature is premised on shows for adults and teenagers. There is scant research on the construction of the police for children and in children’s shows. Kort-Butler (2003) broadly queries superhero cartoons, analyzing representations of the Justice League and finding that it constructs the justice system as ineffective, corrupt, and that heroes are needed to (work primarily outside the law to) capture the worst criminals, while the show promotes themes of incarceration rather than rehabilitation. This crime and justice narrative—rather than police themselves—are the primary lens for the few children’s show analyses found. Ramsy (2020) looks at Steven Universe, unpacking the ways in which the prototypical cartoon binary model of good/evil is subverted. Generally, retributive justice – punishment for the evil-doer – is considered just, but this show instead focuses on restorative justice, which is reconciliation with victims and the perpetrators. More aligned with the current study, Kennedy (2021) analyzes the children’s series Paw Patrol and argues that the show disseminates neoliberal ideologies that sustain racial and class inequities, convincing audiences that citizens should put their trust in “specialized” individuals and corporations when it comes to fighting crime and promoting conservation. No other literature I found considers how police are represented in children’s television.

Social learning theory and script theory

The theoretical underpinning for his study comes from Bandura’s (1971) social‐learning theory and Huesmann’s (1986) script theory. The social learning theory views television as a primary influence in the development of children's socialization skills (Robertson & Rossiter, 1974). Children can learn social, family, and gender roles through media, internalizing parental interactions on TV, for example, as the norm rather than as a socially constructed role (Alade, 2018). Through watching patterns of behavior as seen on TV, as well as the corresponding consequences (or lack thereof) of others’ actions, children understand these behaviors as normative (Harms & Spain, 2016). In this way, televised stories become a context for social learning; stories teach listeners traits, behaviors, moral dilemmas and judgments, and social messages/lessons.

Similarly, script theory describes how viewers learn from narratives on television—the stories and the content therein. In this way, scripts are cognitive structures, which aid people (children included) in determining how to act in certain situations (Abelson, 1981). These scripts assist viewers in understanding people, events, and interactions, helping individuals to make behavioral choices as they happen (Abelson, 1981). For example, a child may learn an aggressive script by observing aggressive behavior in a television program and encodes this behavior into an internal representation. Applied to this paper, scripts may drive children’s decisions about how to view and interact with the police. According to Huesmann (1986), when a person confronts a social situation or problem, their memory of a script guides their behavior. And when these scripts are observed repeatedly, they become easier to recall, and thus people use certain scripts more often.

For the purposes of this study, each television show is understood and analyzed as a structured discourse, a system of knowledge and practice that represents sociocultural and material realities of society. In this way, these children’s shows function as competing systems, modelling for kids not only how to understand the police and their role in society, but also the value judgments that accompany such constructions (Kellner, 2011). For instance, “they” are helpers, which is good. “They” are safe and that we should trust them. “They” follow rules and that is important. This is not to deny viewers’ agency. Aligned with Fiske (1992), Hall (1980, 2005) and a panoply of other cultural theorists, I do not mean to construct people as simply passive consumers or “cultural dopes.” Instead, I acknowledge that viewers interpret and negotiate meanings they see on television through multiple lenses, which are mediated by multiple systems (parents, school, peers, to name a few). However, given the age range of viewers for the shows within this study (ages three through five), I argue that dominant meanings remain crucial in and tantamount to reproducing social realities. TV shows are an essential medium through which children learn about social values and mores and then internalize those for future behaviors.

Cartoons for kids

Cartoons remain the primary form of media that preschool-aged children consume, and cartoons continue to be one of the strongest influencers on their childhood (Soliman, 2015). Furthermore, television for preschoolers generally employs narrative storylines, which necessitate that the child participate in narrative comprehension. Such narrative comprehension stems from a complex sequence of processes that include the children’s interpretation of the information they are shown and building a cognitive representation of what happens in the story(Kendeou, et al., 2005).

However, in the past decade there’s been a dearth of contemporary content analysis research of animated programs. What has been found, primarily with research in 1970s to the early 2000s, is that the content of these shows is varied, and their effects distinctive. Much of the literature focuses on preschool prosocial content, such as Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood (Coates, Pusser & Goodman, 1976), Blue’s Clues (Anderson et al., 2000), Dragon Tales (Rust, 2001), Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood (Rasmussen et al., 2016) and Sesame Street (Fisch, Truglio &Cole, 1999),which have all been shown to increase children’s positive interactions with others. However, many other studies have focused on the antisocial content in children’s cartoons, particularly physical violence and its link to real life increased aggression and violence (Anderson et al., 2003; Asghari et al., 2017; Dhar, 2019). Not only is physical violence often glorified in these shows, but also other antisocial behaviors. This includes making discriminatory or harmful comments to others, yelling at them, intimidating or scaring them, threatening their safety, vandalism, and lying, amongst other examples (Atabay, 2021; Klein & Shiffman, 2012). In these cartoons, and as part of this aggression, untrustworthy authority figures are often shown, along with villains and antagonists (Staben, 2018). This is particularly important given that preschoolers pay more attention to animated characters (Anderson, Alit, Lurch, & Levin, 1979) and over 90% of the top 30 programs children watch are cartoons (Vasquez, 2004).

Preschool-aged socio-emotional development

The preschool years, generally between ages three to five, are an essential time for the development of cognitive functions, as children move from a limited, egocentric view of the world to one that is more logical, realistic, and autonomous (Davies, 1999; Piaget, 1965). It is during these years that preschoolers are better able to develop and communicate their moral perspective and ideas, create more complex social relations, and gain a greater awareness about their environment, including their own interpretation of their social world (Davies, 1999). Research studies have shown that preschoolers can recognize the unfairness or wrongness of different transgressions, such as lying, name-calling, hitting, and stealing (Bierworth &Blumberg, 2010; Smetana et al., 1999; Smetana, Schlagman, & Adams, 1993; Weston & Turiel, 1980).

During these preschool years, children can recognize and understand the differences between the world they live in...	...and the world of fantasy.

One of the many developmental abilities that preschoolers develop during is the ability to distinguish between fantasy and reality (Flavell, Flavell, & Green, 1987). During these preschool years, children can recognize and understand the differences between the world they live in and the world of fantasy. Indeed, it is in this time period of recognition and comprehension that television content begins to target these preschoolers (Anderson & Subrahmanyam, 2017). Information processing, as well as memory abilities, improve starting at two, advancing through the years, as does children’s attention to television content. By age three, children are ready to learn from the screen, and they have the ability to learn from shows that are tailored towards their age group (Mares & Pan, 2013). Experiencing production formats, genre, animation, and concrete audio and visual effects, children are able to judge television’s social realism. Additionally, the form of the cartoon itself makes children attentive to the screen and the narrative,  thereby influencing aspects of their socioemotional development (Huston & Wright, 1998; Rajawat, 2017).

Methods

This study employs content analysis predicated on an a priori coding scheme developed through study of the literature on police and media. Nick Jr. is a popular network on cable television, with an accompany pay-for-streaming service called Noggin, which principally targets preschoolers and toddlers ages two- to six-years old. Nick Jr. is available to about 54 million households in the United States, as of 2023, thus making its influence and reach substantial. Shows were selected via purposeful sampling from the children’s shows on Nick Jr. In order to attain a manageable sample of the current lineup of 21 different shows, shows and episodes were chosen based on content, selecting for plot and characters that included the police and/or police officers. Five of the 21 shows had content that dealt with police and policing. The combined daily viewing rates for these five shows is 483,000. Table 1 notes the characteristics of the shows selected for this study.

Table 1: Shows selected for current study

Show Platform	Show Title	Targeted Viewer Age (years)	Episode Length	Episode Format
Nick Jr.	Paw Patrol	3-5	23 min	Animated
	Peppa Pig	3-5	9-18 min	Animated
	The Adventures of Paddington	3-5	21 min	Animated
	Blaze and the Monster Machines	3-5	22 min	Animated
	Bubble Guppies	3-5	24 min	Animated

 

 

 

In total, 20 episodes were selected, nine from Paw Patrol, [1] [open endnotes in new window] four from Peppa Pig, two from Blaze and the Monster Machines, two from The Adventures of Paddington, and three from Bubble Guppies.

The Adventures of Paddington was one of the shows analyzed in this study.	Peppa Pig was the fifth television show in this analysis. All shows chosen had episodes specifically connected to the police and policing.

In order to create inter-coder reliability, an undergraduate research assistant and principal investigator worked independently, coding a sample of the posts and responses and discussing our findings with each other. During this iterative process, the principal investigator resolved any coding discrepancies. The codes and definitions for these codes are shown in Table 2.

Table 2: Coding and Definitions

Code	Definition of Code
Local Authority	Has power and a slightly higher status in the community; someone to listen to: a leader even outside of uniform
Role Model/Model of Citizenship	Someone to look up to especially toward children; what citizens should strive to be
Facilitator of Community	Facilitates a sense of community; brings people together, and is connected to the community
Accessible/Personal	Easily reachable and as personal friends