Is fame more important to tweens than it used to be? A new study suggests that young kids of this decade are vastly more familiar with and are more likely to value individualistic personality traits like fame, achievement and wealth than kids of past eras — way back before the term “tween” was even invented — largely because of popular TV shows and other types of media. The study, which was done by Yalda Uhls and Patricia Greenfield of the University of California, Los Angeles, analyzed the content of the two most popular TV shows with kids aged 9 to 11 once a decade from 1967 to 2007. They found that, particularly between 1997 and 2007, the value placed on characteristics like fame and achievement in such shows had skyrocketed. The importance of community-oriented traits like benevolence and conformity, meanwhile, took a back seat. Uhls and Greenfield theorize that because social change in that decade was mostly driven by technological expansion, this dramatic shift in cultural values was also technology-based. Increased access to these shows through mobile and other devices, along with the Internet-based advertising and TV fan clubs, may amplify their impact on kids’ impressionable minds, the authors said. VIDEO: Sesame Street’s Viral Ambitions In 1997, when the two most popular tween shows were Sabrina the Teenage Witch and Boy Meets World, the portrayal of values like fame was relatively low (it ranked 15th out of 16 values), the study found. This was in keeping with prior years (the era of The Lucy Show or even Alf) when fame had always fallen near the bottom. By 2007, viewers said the most important values promoted by the top shows — Hannah Montana and American Idol — were fame and achievement. Conversely, “community feeling,” that is, the importance of being part of a community, which had been the first or second most important value in any TV show until 1997, was ranked 11th by 2007. The authors calculated their rankings based on analyses by 60 people aged 18 to 59 who  … Continue reading Is TV Teaching Kids to Value Fame Above All?