Images of Children in American Film: A Sociocultural Analysis

From 1925 to World War II, the image of children in American films was one of unqualified innocence. After World War II, however, some significant variations occurred. First, the child star era sharply declined; second, new images of children that would have been unthinkable in the earlier years slowly began to appear. By the 1970s, monster children and precocious imps became standard movie fare. This study, utilizing socio-cultural criticism, approaches popular commercial films as artifacts that mirror their culture and finds that recurring narrative images of children in films reflect changing mass attitudes toward childhood and innocence in 20th-century America.