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I’m a hardcore cartoon lover. One of the first things I did when I came to college was find out on what channel Cartoon Network is aired in the US. Some of my most pleasant, peaceful childhood memories include Saturday and Sunday mornings sitting in my sunny living room with my little brother, eating cereal out of a bag, and watching The Road Runner. Before that, growing up in Korea, I remember watching Pokémon, Digimon, and Sailor Moon, and singing along to every opening song.

But I have had thoughts about the kinds of ideas that children’s animated television (CATV) fosters in children. I started thinking to myself about these things after my little brother, Danny, started watching them with me. Being 6 years older, I was very much the protective and disciplinary older sister. What I began to see in my little brother were things like how in make-believe play, he would always make the girl characters overly obsessed with their appearance.

But those thoughts were simply fleeting in my childhood. I grew up still loving cartoons, still watching them every day with Danny, and mourning the days of “good cartoons” with my friends in high school (Where did The Powerpuff Girls go and what the heck is Gravity Falls?!). Today, I went to a talk by my child development professor, Chip Gidney, and my childhood crashed and burned around me as he talked. This talk was hosted by Taste of Tufts, an organization that invites Tufts professors to introduce themselves as people outside of the classroom environment: as people who engage in real world research and pioneer their fields. Chip spoke about his long-term research project, The Children’s Television Project, in which he and fellow professors examine the content of  CATV, the producers who make the decisions on what to include, and finally CATV’s influences on children’s development.

Chip’s primary example of how cartoons convey important social messages was Lion King. I learned that Lion King has characters and scenes that propound unmistakably racist attitudes. Chip pointed out that The Elephant’s Graveyard, where Scar and his hyenas (who happen to be depicted in dark-skinned and dark colors) live, was analogous to the concept of “the other side of the tracks”, a historical indicator of racial segregation. Not only that, but Chip also drew our attention to the sociolinguistic dialects depicted in the movie Lion King. While Mufasa and Simba speak in what we know as standard English, Scar and the hyenas speak in African American English, and Timon and Pumba, the comic relief, speak in a working class white dialect. The assignment of dialects onto animal characters playing specific roles really speaks to the way that the media industry perceives and plays a part in the reinforcement of stereotypes.

This stereotypical treatment of characters in cartoons extends beyond the one social stratification, race, to encompass others such as gender. I learned that there are twice as many boy characters as girl characters in CATV, and that the proportion of “skinny and pretty” girl characters hugely outweigh the number of “good-looking” boy characters. Furthermore, storylines tend to encompass more boys’ stories starring them as heroes. So in effect, girls are told that boys’ stories are worth listening to, that girls have to be thin and concerned about their appearance, and that they cannot expect to be the main character. Of course, everything is connected, and the representations of gender, race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic class interact with each other to create their own powerful stereotypes.

Accurate, non-stereotypical, and fair representation of society is especially salient in children’s cartoons because as we learn in child development, children believe everything that they see until four to five years of age. That means that when they see “bad guys” as consistently being dark-skinned, they are forming critical and long lasting relationships between skin color and the character of a person. Exposure to non-stereotypical diverse characters will help shape children into having healthy ideas of what diverse people are really like, no matter what their skin color, gender, size, or dialect.

I do think that over time, CATV is becoming more socially conscious, though. Here’s a shout out to Adventure Time, one example of how diversity is being introduced to children’s cartoons. Before I left for college, I watched a lot of Adventure Time. I started watching the show because I heard Korean being spoken on TV, and I assumed it was a Korean reality show or something on TV. When I realized it was Lady Rainicorn speaking straight up Korean on an American TV show on Cartoon Network, I was hooked. It was the representation of my native tongue that made me start watching. Adventure Time not only has linguistic diversity, but there exists an entire alternate universe where Fionna and Cake star as the heroines, not Jake and Finn, who usually save the day. Granted, Fionna and Cake make fewer appearances than Jake and Finn, but it’s definitely a starting point. Princess Bubblegum, who makes more frequent appearances, is a pink, kind, and lovely princess who practices some kick-ass science and self-love, and often ends up solving conflicts.

Yes, going to Chip Gidney’s talk today totally reshaped my childhood. I am rethinking all the cartoons I love and finding that almost all of them are problematic. But that is the beauty, and perhaps the point, of growing up: that you reflect on the process in which you created your ideas of self, and ask questions about who you are, who you are not, and what you are going to become.

Think back to a time when you used to watch cartoons, if you don’t anymore. Think about all the social implications they taught you, and consider how they are affecting children all over the world now. How do you think CATV should aim to improve? Do you think they have improved from the past in providing fair representations of people in different social categories?