'Not suitable for children' : young Maltese children's perceptions of adulthood and adult-rated TV programmes

Abstract

This paper joins the educational debate on the role of the media in the lives and socialisation of young people by considering how young children' s experiences of watching television form an integral part of their emerging sense of identity. The focus is on how children talk about and perceive 'adult-rated' material on television, and how this relates to their understanding of how 'adulthood' is distinguished from 'childhood. ' It contends that younger children' s understanding of the 'adult' is often pieced together from disjointed and commodified fragments, and that this fragmentation also informs children's performative attempts to distance themselves from the 'childish' in order to build their own 'adult' subjectivities. The evidence is drawn mainly from a series of thirty focus-group interviews with 164 children aged between five and ten, and coming from different socio-economic backgrounds in the Mediterranean island state of Malta. The interviews were conducted in 1998 and 1999, and formed part of a larger project which also included a comparable number of interviews with older children (aged 11 to 14) as well as with parents and teachers.