According to Peter Stearns, the scientific advancements and
the improvement of children’s living standards in the twentieth century had
paradoxically created new concerns for parents who wanted to protect their
valuable children from harm.[i] In other words,
as their environment became more secure, and their standards higher, parents
were even more anxious to protect their children. Stearns argues that this was
how a new rhetoric child rearing was built upon parents’ desire to discard
chance and accident.[ii] In this
rhetoric, not only did accidents, health problems, and other malices come to be
seen as unacceptable, but also they were considered “outside the child’s
obvious control, and without any fault on the child’s part.” The reflection of
increasing parental anxiety and the unacceptability of accidents on Turkey’s
news media was quite straightforward, as evidenced by the significant increase
in articles reporting the infinite number of perils children’s lives were in.
By the mid-1980s, a judging style emerged in articles about
accidents and other misfortunes children encountered. Mothers were cautioned
that the world beyond their doorstep was full of dangers. The common point of
these texts was that they warned parents against threats that could have been
considered somewhat out of their reach and control, they were told not only to
be aware, but also beware of strangers, when sporadic child kidnapping cases
were presented as crime sprees, and isolated theft stories were presented as
criminal waves. Socially rooted problems like children addicted to drugs and
inhaling psychotic substances were narrated as tragic family stories. Instead of
demanding secure grounds for children, the press warned the parents to keep
their children indoors to protect them from the uncontrolled city streets. The
only exception was Milliyet’s
insistence on governmental responsibility in securing urban landscapes for
children.
Moreover, children’s health became an issue of concern as
well. While unusual diseases were presented to the reader with a certain
fascination of new medicinal advancements, they also informed perturbed mothers
of thousands of strange diseases. What accompanied these news articles was a
new rhetoric used in health news that implied that the mother was in total
control of her children’s health. Ahıska and Yenal observe that news about “the
new person ideal” became a common topic after the 1980s, the overarching theme
of which was “the return to self and accepting the responsibility to optimize one’s own health and competence.”[iii] This “self
improvement/self help” literature included tips to motivate individual control
over well-being, and stories of personal accomplishments were prevalent among
child-related articles that targeted families. In the case of children, the
emphasis was on parental responsibilities, and mothers were the designated
controllers over children’s psychology, physical health and competence. This
can be interpreted as a distortion of the scientific motherhood rhetoric of the
early century to an omnipresent, over-capable super mother.
Parental anxieties over children’s well-being were not
limited to threats or illnesses coming from outside either, their safety at
home also became a favourite subject of news reports. Domestic accidents, which
rarely turned into news stories unless they resulted in injuries or deaths in
the 1970s, came to cover a great proportion of child-related news by the next
decade. The peak was in 1987, when Hürriyet
published more than twenty reports about non-life threatening accidents,
quarter of which were on the cover. Thus, the newspapers were stocked with
stories of domestic accidents as almost-disasters and children who
could-have-been-victims. Although this might be a result of the increase in
page numbers and hospital reporters, the disproportionate representation of
unsupervised children who encountered mishaps in households drew a surreal
landscape in which everything, from balloons to candies, from pencils to
erasers, from horses to roosters were accidents waiting to happen; children
were sitting ducks who could hurt themselves while playing house, walking in
the street, or listening to the hissing sound of lighters. [iv]
They were potential victims that mothers
should keep under constant surveillance.
If the construction of the “fragile child” was one side of
the coin, then the other side was the emphasis on parental liability and negligence.
In 1977, only one out of the five articles about children who had lost their
lives in accidents published in Hürriyet
contained the word “negligence.” However, in the following years, “negligence”
became a buzzword in news accusing “inattentive” and “lousy” mothers whose
carelessness slaughtered their children. Even a child injured when he found a
hand grenade on the street could be presented with the subtitle, “Caution,
mothers and fathers!”[v] without any
questioning of the strange presence of an explosive in plain sight. These
“failed” mothers who were in fact those who suffered the most were introduced
as deterrent examples to other families.
The same media that failed to draw the obvious link between
low income, poor sanitation, and contagious malaria found a pattern in random
cases of domestic accidents and regionally diverse kidnappings. According to
World Health Organisation, one in five child labourers in Turkey suffered from
a workplace-related injury or illness in the second half of the 1980s. However,
Hürriyet published only a single news
story about a workplace accident the year it published twenty odd reports about
children slightly injured at home. This is not to suggest that children were
not falling sick, attacked or injured in domestic accidents. However, as put by
Schudson, the media drew a dramatic landscape full of fragile innocent kids “by
selecting, highlighting, framing, shading, and shaping in reportage, they
create an impression that real people – readers and viewers – then take to be
real and to which they respond in their lives.”[vi] Thus, child
rearing advice and accident reports that addressed mothers alike were
instrumental in the familialisation of children’s health, security, and
development. Psychologists, pedagogues, and physicians came together in blaming
the parents for not protecting their kids.
*Excerpt from my unpublished PhD Thesis. Cut the
Kids in Half: New Urban Childhoods in Turkey Through the Lens of the
Mainstream Media, 1977-1997. Supervisor: Prof. Ayşe Buğra. Istanbul:
Bogazici University, 2015.
[i] Peter N.
Stearns, Anxious Parents: A History of
Modern Child Rearing in America (New York: NYU Press, 2004), p.26.
[ii] Stearns, p.17.
[iii] Meltem Ahıska
and Zafer Yenal, The Person You Have
Called Cannot Be Reached at the Moment: Representations of Lifestyles in
Turkey, 1980-2005 (İstanbul: Ottoman Bank Archives and Research Centre,
2006), p.43.
[iv] “Balon uçtu,
Beyhan uçtu” (Baloon took off, Beyhan took off) Hürriyet, 14 April 1982; “Renkli şekerleri çocuklar ilaçlarla
karıştırıyor” (Children are confusing coloured candies with drugs) Hürriyet, 19 April 1982; “Kalem kurbanı”
(Victim to a pencil) Hürriyet, 30
September 1982; “Küçük öğrencinin kulağına silgi kaçtı” (An eraser blocked the
little student’s ear) Hürriyet, 18
November 1982; “Az daha erkekliğini
kaybedecekti” (He’d almost lost his manhood - Headline) Türkiye, 23 June 1982; “Murat’ı horoz gagaladı” (Murat was pecked
by a cock- Headline) Hürriyet, 4
April 1982; “Evcilik kör ediyordu”
(Playing house almost blinded them) Hürriyet,
12 March 1982; “Afacan Recai meraktan ölecekti” (His curiosity had almost
killed the little rascal Recai)Hürriyet,
21 February 1982.
[v] “Top diye bomba ile oynayan Ali’nin
parmakları koptu” (Ali lost his fingers when he mistook a hand grenade for a
ball) Hürriyet, 17 August 1982.
[vi] Schudson, The Sociology of News, (New York: Norton, 2003), p.2.
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