#62. A Brief History of Moral Panics Concerning Kids and Their Chosen Media

The current call to bar kids from online social media is the most recent in a long series of panics about kids and media

Dear Friends,

Whenever a new technology comes along that creates a revolutionarily new means of communication or amusement, the young glom onto it and their elders, or a highly vocal group of them, believe it is leading to the wreck and ruin of the young. A term commonly applied to such reactions is moral panic.

I’m not completely comfortable with the term moral panic, but I’ll use it because it’s used regularly by historians and social scientists who study this phenomenon. The phenomenon is not really “panic” in the sense of what happens when a crowded theater catches fire. It’s a persistent and often gradually growing worry or fear about damage to the young done by the new media. It arises out of a natural, one might even say healthy, neophobia on the part of those who have lived well into adulthood without the new media, combined with an equally natural and benevolent desire to protect the young. Something new, which has never been experienced before in the history of humanity, might be dangerous; and it might be especially dangerous for kids because we view kids (rightly or wrongly) as more fragile and vulnerable than adults.

The “moral” part of moral panic enters in two ways. Most such panics in the past were concerned with moral corruption of the young. The media were seen as inciting violence, crime, sexual promiscuity, and/or disrespect for social institutions and conventions. The most recent panic, to be discussed in later letters, but also see here, however, concerns kids’ mental wellbeing more than morals.

The other, perhaps more meaningful way that “moral” figures into moral panic derives from the implicit or explicit assumption that adults have a moral duty to protect the young. The purveyors of the new media—the cheap-novel industry, movie industry, comic book industry, video game industry, or online social media industry (depending on the era under consideration)—are seen as exploiting the vulnerability of the young for the sake of riches for themselves. It is the moral duty of the rest of us, who care about children, to protect the morals (or psyches) of the young from the exploits of greedy industries and their captains. It’s a compelling argument.

A common assumption underlying such panics is that children are innocent, vulnerable, and lacking in self-control. Never mind that they are going out of their way to get at the new media, spending their own sometimes-hard-earned money on it, actively making it a major part of their lives, often brilliant in their ways of describing and using it, and, if anyone bothers to ask, usually able to explain what they get from it. We have a strong tendency, ever more so in recent times, to view children as puppets, controlled by societal forces, rather than agents of their own behavior. If they spend great amounts of time on some activity that we think is no good, we say they are “addicted,” and we point to the media purveyors as deliberately adding the addictive ingredients to capture and hold children’s attention. We also make assumptions about what is good for kids or not, without respecting or even asking for their opinions. We hate the thought that kids like better what they choose themselves than what we try to foist on them.

Moral panics often arise from concerns that are initially moderate and reasonable. But intense focus on the concerns turns them into fears, which are augmented and spread because fear creates selective perception and attention. What seems to confirm the fear is noted, discussed, and blown up in the observers’ minds and in the media. Evidence tending to disconfirm the fear is overlooked or dismissed. Plausible stories are created to explain a hypothesized causal link between the media in question and its putative harm to kids, and then the stories are presented as proofs. The stories come to be understood as laws of nature, so if empirical data don’t provide much evidence for a link, the stories do, in the minds of the morally panicked. Data that contradict the stories must be wrong (I’ve heard that from a few readers in response to my critiques of the latest panic).

There are two levels of media in these panics about media. One is the media that is the target of the panic, and other is the media that spreads the panic. Bad news is good news for selling newspapers, magazines, or popular books and for drawing consumers to newscasts, public lectures, or, in today’s world, podcasts. All media are out to make money. The media that adults are worrying about are making money, and so are the media that spread and dramatize the adults’ worries.

In most moral panics, some person arises as a primary crusader. Often the crusader is someone already known to and well respected by a large portion of the public. It might be a prominent minister, journalist, medical doctor, or professor. When that person comes out in support of the fear, the fear gains greater legitimacy. The crusader articulates the stories better than most others could, with a voice of certainty and authority that turns hypotheses into apparent facts. The crusaders are usually not charlatans. They are people of integrity who sincerely believe in the cause. They spur the creation of organizations aimed at fighting the harm and lobbying with governments to make laws designed to prevent children from having access to the harmful media.

The crusaders’ claims are seductive, to the adult mind, not just because the crusaders are respected and believed to have the facts in hand, but also because the solutions they offer seem simple and do-able. If kids’ problems derive largely from the media to which they are flocking, all we need to do is take that media away from them. The claims are seductive also because they shift the blame from how we—you, I, and the society we have created—are treating children and place it squarely on those greedy media companies.

If you wanted to reduce petty theft and teen pregnancy in Victorian times, all you had to do was stop the publication of “penny dreadfuls” in England or “dime novels” in America. During the Great Depression of the 1930s you could do the same by closing the movie theaters to kids under 18 not accompanied by an adult. During the the post-war 1940s and ‘50s, you could do it, and at the same time improve kids’ sleep, by stopping the sale of horror comics. The implicit message, rarely stated so bluntly, is that you can cure kids’ ills without having to deal with more complex problems that are meshed into the structure of the social world we adults have created. The crusaders also gloss over, ignore, or deny the positive gains kids might be getting from their chosen media activities, creating the belief that closing it off to them would entail no loss.

Examples of Past Moral Panics About Kids and Media

Here are the most well-documented examples of moral panics about kids and media over the past two centuries.

Penny Dreadfuls and Dime Novels in the Victorian Era

By the middle of the 19^th century, printing and distribution technology had reached a point that fiction could be made available at a price that working-class kids could afford. In the UK, in the last half of the 19^th century, a huge interest for kids and alarm for adults were serialized dramatic stories, published regularly in installments sold for a penny each. The price was low enough that kids could afford them from money they earned themselves, and those who couldn’t afford them arranged to borrow them or collaborate with others to purchase and share them. It is estimated that by 1850 there were about 100 publishers of such fictions in the UK. Nearly all boys and some girls, especially from the lower classes, read them. The stories were typically sensationalized, continuing episodes of the adventures of detectives, criminals, and supernatural entities.

In the decades before compulsory schooling (which began in the UK in 1880), these serialized dramas arguably did more than any other societal change to promote literacy among working class kids. The language was simple enough, and kids learned from one another how to read them. But adult moralists hated them. They were sure that the high rates of juvenile petty crime in London and other cities resulted from kids’ reading these fictions, which seemed to celebrate crime. Among the more famous were Varney the Vampire; Sweeny Todd (the Demon Barber of Fleet Street); and various interpretations and expansions of the Robin Hood legend. I imagine that London gentry especially hated stories about robbing from the rich to give to the poor, but all stories that would seem to upset the social order were, by definition, “upsetting.” (It has been said by others, I’m not sure how accurately, that compulsory schooling arose in the UK not so much to teach reading, as most kids could already do that, but to gain more control over what they read.)

John Springhall (1998) quotes crusader journalist James Green as depicting the penny dreadful personified with the following words (in 1874): “He may be lurking at this very moment in [your young son’s] private chamber, little as you suspect it, polluting his mind and smoothing the way that leads to swift destruction.” Springhall also quotes William Groser, an author of Sunday School teachers’ manuals, as warning that “penny dreadfuls diffuse subtle poison among tens of thousands of youthful readers. They bring wreckage and havoc … and ruination to hundreds of our brightest and best lads and lasses.”

In the United States at that time, the equivalent of the dreadfuls were called dime novels or half dimes, according to their size and the price. The campaign against them resembled the UK’s campaign against dreadfuls. According to Springhall (1998), the Christian moralist Anthony Comstock (famous for the Comstock laws promoting censorship of almost anything having to do with sex), characterized the dimes and half-dimes as “corrupting the young, glamorizing criminal behavior, and responsible for the fearful increase of youthful criminals in our cities in recent years.” He campaigned until his death to put the publishers out of business. Another crusader, political economist Harriet Marineau, condemned the stories as “full of animal passion and defiant lawlessness, trials of celebrated malefactors, madness and suicide” and contended they were “powerful in preparing the young for convict life.” An example of how the press promoted the panic was a news story attributing a 14-year-old boy’s suicide to “a period of mental aberration caused by reading dime novels” (West, 1985).

The Motion Picture Panic of the 1930s

New technology in the late 1920s made talking movies possible. Hollywood quickly capitalized. The first feature-length talking film was the Jazz Singer, released in 1927. From then on, especially through the 1930s, the movie industry soared. It also happened that this glory period for movies coincided with the Great Depression, which threw huge numbers of people out of work and into poverty. This was also the period that followed on the heels of the crime mob era brought on by Prohibition in the 1920s. Not surprisingly, the 1930s saw a growth in crime, including (mostly petty) crime by kids.

So, two things happened simultaneously. The movie industry soared, and juvenile delinquency soared. Crusaders were quick to see the correlation and jumped to the conclusion that the movies were causing the delinquency.

It truly was a glory period for Hollywood. With huge audiences, admission prices could be kept very low, which ensured continuation of huge audiences. The movies depicted a glamorous, romantic, exciting world very different from the dreary one outside the theater. The movies were an escape, perhaps a reason for living at a time when for many it was hard to see another reason. It wasn’t just kids who flocked to the movies, adults did too, but kids reportedly spent more time there than adults (Forman, 1935), and the moralists’ concerns were mostly about kids. The kids were watching movies that were made primarily for adults and, to the moralists, were not appropriate for kids.

According to data reported at the time, the average kid from about age 8 to 19 watched approximately 50 movies a year, and if you subtracted out the fraction who weren’t able to go to movies at all the average for the others was well over 50 a year (Forman, 1935). Many went to the theater several times a week. It was common also in those days for kids to stay in the theater to watch the same movie more than once, for no additional charge. The stars—including Gary Cooper, Edward G. Robinson, James Cagney, Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, and Jean Harlow—were glamorous.

The panic was so quick and strong that, already in 1931, gangster movies, which were seen as most dangerous, were banned outright in Worcester, MA, Syracuse, NY, Evanston, Ill, and West Orange, NJ (Springhall, 1989). The concern also led, by 1930, to founding of a research organization, the Motion Picture Research Council, to conduct scientific studies aimed at understanding the effects of movies on kids. The scientists, associated with major universities, conducted not just surveys and interviews, but even did experiments in which kids watched movies while they were wired up to devices to see how their bodies were reacting, or were wired during that night’s sleep to see how watching a movie might disrupt sleep. Kids in reform schools were interviewed to understand how their movie watching might have landed them there and were often used as the subjects in experiments such as those just mentioned.

The studies were published in eight boring volumes, which few people read, and which proved very little. Unbiased analyses of them showed the studies to be poorly designed and the results to be mixed and inconclusive. But Henry James Forman, a true crusader, was tasked with the job of condensing the findings for the public. The result was a single volume titled Our Movie Made Children.

For the book, Forman culled out those bits of the research that seemed to support the thesis that movies were affecting kids for the worse and presented those bits without the tedious details of methodology or how small and mixed the effects were. For example, he summarized the results of interviews of girls housed in “an institution for girl sex delinquents” (Did you know that those existed?) by claiming that many of the girls attributed to movies “a craving for luxury, cabarets, wild parties, and men making love to them.” Forman went on to tour the country, denouncing the film industry. A headline announcing his report in Albany read: “Film—A school for crime.” (Springhall, 1998).

Medical journals also rang the alarm. Dr. Mary Preston wrote in the Journal of Pediatrics (1941) that three-quarters of the children she studied were “addicted” to bad radio and movies, which disturbed their sleep and eating and made them emotionally callous. She wrote: “This atrophy leaves scar tissue in the form of a hardness, an intense selfishness, even mercilessness, proportionate to the amount of exposure and its play on the native temperament of each child.”

The Post WWII Comic Book Panic

Comic books had been around for a long time, but the late 1940s and early ‘50s led to serialized comics, often in the horror genre, with titles like The Haunt of Fear, The Vault of Horror and Tales from the Crypt. Popular also were superhero comics, which seemed to glorify violence. Kids spent a lot of time with these comics. They traded them, discussed them, acted them out. All this was frightening to some adults. It seemed like such a desolate activity, taking kids’ time away from more healthful pursuits while at the same time, adults supposed, inuring kids to violence or jangling their nervous systems in unhealthy ways.

The leading anti-comics crusader was psychiatrist Dr. Fredric Wertham. In his book Seduction of the Innocent: The Influence of Comic Books on Today’s Youth (1954), Wertham contended that rising crime and immorality among youth at the time stemmed directly from the influence of comics. Not just horror comics, but all comics depicting violence or crime or sexuality, or that fell in any way into his category of immorality, were his target. He even played into the anti-gay prejudices of the time by suggesting that Batman and Robin were gay lovers, and those comics were subtly encouraging that category of sinful alliance. In testimony before Congress, aimed at banning all such comics (which would have been the majority of all comics), he reportedly said: “I think Hitler was a beginner compared to the comic-book industry. They get the children much younger.” Wertham’s book gained even more influence on the general public when it was condensed in the pages of Readers Digest. In the end, Congress did not outlaw comics but instead pressured the comics industry into a period of self-censure. Even so, Wertham and other crusaders were successful in getting laws regulating the production and sales of comic books in thirteen states (Mintz, 2004).

Television

I’ll gloss over the panic about television, which was relatively minor because, at least at first, television was family entertainment, often in the living room together, and the programming for kids was generally benign, even overtly “educational.” But I can’t resist suggesting that television may in fact be more harmful than any of the other media discussed in this letter, because it is the most passive. You don’t have to do anything or go anywhere to get to it, and you can’t interact with it. You just slouch down and watch it. It’s probably more responsible for the obesity epidemic than anything else that has come along in my lifetime, as over time it attracted ever more viewers of all ages for ever-longer portions of the day. People who in the past would have gone out to play sports with others in the neighborhood plopped down to watch sports (or anything else) on TV instead. But television didn’t induce much moral panic, so I’ll move on to video games.

The Video Game Panic of the 1990s and Early 21^st Century

I can be brief here, as most of you reading this letter have lived through this one. As kids, especially boys, glommed onto video games, a hue and cry rang out about the harm the games were inflicting. I can also be brief because I wrote about those alarms—specifically the claims about the games being addictive and causing violence—and the evidence countering those claims years ago, in essays, which you can access here and here. I cited in the second of these, as exemplifying the panic, an article in the New York Post by Dr. Nicholas Kardaras under the headline, It’s Digital Heroin: How Screens Turn Kids into Psychotic Junkies, full of outrageous misinformation but probably soaked up by readers of the Post. As I pointed out, in the first of those essays, attempts to legally ban or regulate video games, in both Australia and the United States, failed when the Supreme Court of the respective countries examined the evidence of harm and found it lacking.

Now, in 2025, the panic about video games has lessened, partly because of the growing research evidence of more benefit than harm from such games (see my posts here, here, and here), but mostly, I suspect, because the games have been around long enough that many parents grew up playing them and many still play them.

That’s what happens with moral panics about kids’ chosen forms of media. They come and go with each generation. When a new form of media or entertainment first appears it is scary to the adults, but by the time the kids who glommed onto it are adults with their own kids, it is no longer seen as scary. Of course, the main panic today is about kids’ uses of smartphones and online social media. That fear too will fade before long, and fear of some not-yet-invented media will replace it.

I hear it now. “Remember the innocent good old days when the most dreadful thing we kids did was to share texts, photos, and videos with one another on our phones?”

ConcludingThoughts

As you might have guessed, this letter is designed as a lead-up to a future letter (perhaps my next one), about the smartphone/social media panic that has been simmering for several years and exploded with the publication of Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation. Stay tuned. This latest panic follows the script of all the others I have just described.

And now, I welcome your reactions. What kids’ activities provoked panic when you were a kid? How did you deal with it then? What do you think of it now? This substack is, in part, a forum for discussion. Your questions, thoughts, stories, and opinions are valued and treated respectfully by me and other readers, regardless of the degree to which we agree or disagree. Readers’ comments add to the value of these letters for everyone.

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With respect and best wishes,

Peter

References

Jeff Jarvis (2024). The web we weave: Why we must reclaim the Internet from moguls, misanthropes, and moral panic. NY: Basic Books.

Steven Mintz, S. (2004). Huck’s raft: A history of American childhood. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.

John Springhall (1998), Youth, popular culture, and moral panic: Penny gaffs to gangsta-rap, 1830-1996. NY: St. Martin’s Press. [Note: this was my source for much of what I reported concerning the first three of the panics discussed in this letter.]

Mark West (1985). The response of children’s librarians to dime novels and series books. Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 10(3) 137-139.