Don't Use Your Words!: Children's Emotions in a Networked World

Children are taught to control their feelings through cultural production, such as drawings, fan art, memes, YouTube videos, dance moves, and conversations while gaming online. Dont Use Your Words! challenges the norms by highlighting the ways kids express their feelings in specific contexts, such as immigration policy and electoral politics. Juffer argues that kids have the agency to answer for themselves about what it feels like to be a kid.

\n Format: Paperback / softback
\n Length: 304 pages
\n Publication date: 28 May 2019
\n Publisher: New York University Press
\n

Today, even young kids communicate with one another through social media by referencing memes, songs, and movements, creating a common vernacular that resists parental, educational, and media imperatives to name their feelings and thus control their bodies. Over the past two decades, children's television programming has provided a therapeutic site for the processing of emotions such as anger, but in doing so has enforced normative structures of feeling that, Jane Juffer argues, weaken the intensity and range of children's affective experiences. Don't Use Your Words! seeks to challenge those norms, highlighting the ways that kids express their feelings through cultural productions including drawings, fan art, memes, YouTube videos, dance moves, and conversations while gaming online. Focusing on kids between ages five and nine, Don't Use Your Words! situates these productions in specific contexts, including immigration policy referenced in drawings by Central American children just released from detention centers and electoral politics as contested in kids artwork expressing their anger at Trump's victory. Taking issue with the mainstream tendency to speak on behalf of children, Juffer argues that kids have the agency to answer for themselves: what does it feel like to be a kid?

Today, even young kids communicate with one another through social media by referencing memes, songs, and movements, creating a common vernacular that resists parental, educational, and media imperatives to name their feelings and thus control their bodies. Over the past two decades, children's television programming has provided a therapeutic site for the processing of emotions such as anger, but in doing so has enforced normative structures of feeling that, Jane Juffer argues, weaken the intensity and range of children's affective experiences. Don't Use Your Words! seeks to challenge those norms, highlighting the ways that kids express their feelings through cultural productions including drawings, fan art, memes, YouTube videos, dance moves, and conversations while gaming online. Focusing on kids between ages five and nine, Don't Use Your Words! situates these productions in specific contexts, including immigration policy referenced in drawings by Central American children just released from detention centers and electoral politics as contested in kids artwork expressing their anger at Trump's victory. Taking issue with the mainstream tendency to speak on behalf of children, Juffer argues that kids have the agency to answer for themselves: what does it feel like to be a kid?

\n Weight: 454g\n
Dimension: 230 x 158 x 16 (mm)\n
ISBN-13: 9781479833054\n \n