With the ever-increasing amount of media children are consuming, it has become important for parents to learn how to help them navigate this consumption productively. All too often, the only approach to screen time by parents is a question of limiting how much and what kind. Instead, if parents and educators can adopt a more nuanced relationship to media and education, adults and children can come together in order to engage with and deconstruct the messages that are embedded in popular culture. This enables children to become more informed citizens. This collection seeks to do just that by providing a series of essays on strategies to engage children with varying topics and programming to ensure that media consumption is an active process that promotes social and political awareness instead of apathetic entertainment.

Parents often feel at a loss with popular culture and how it fits in with their families. They want to love their children well, but it can be overwhelming to navigate the murky waters of television, movies, games, and more that their kids are exposed to every day. Popular culture doesn’t have to be a burden. The Pop Culture Parent equips mothers, fathers, and guardians to build relationships with their children by entering into their popular culture–informed worlds, understanding them biblically, and passing on wisdom. This resource by authors Ted Turnau, E. Stephen Burnett, and Jared Moore, provides Scripture-based, practical help for parents to enjoy the messy gift of popular culture with their kids. By engaging with their children’s interests, parents can explore culture while teaching their children to become missionaries in a post-Christian world. By providing realistic yet biblical encouragement for parents, the coauthors guide readers to engage with popular culture through a gospel lens, helping them teach their kids to understand and answer the challenges raised by popular culture. The Pop Culture Parent helps the next generation of evangelicals move beyond a posture of cultural ignorance to one of cultural engagement, building grace-oriented disciples and cultural missionaries.

Everything aspiring authors need to write, publish, and sell a children's book Everyone loves a children's book—and many dream about writing one. But is it actually possible for an unpublished writer—armed with a good story idea and a love of kids—to write, sell, publish, and promote a book? Yes, it is! Clearly and concisely written with straightforward advice and a plethora of specific up-to-date recommendations, Writing Children's Books For Dummies provides step-by-step information on everything aspiring children's book authors need to know—from researching the current marketplace to developing story ideas, strengthening writing skills, dealing with editors, and submitting proposals and manuscripts to agents and publishers. Updated and improved writing exercises All new content on social media and establishing an online presence as an author Fresh, updated content on publishing via hard copy and all the e- platforms From setting down that first word on paper to doing a successful publicity tour, Writing Children's Books For Dummies gives you the confidence and the insiders' know-how to write and sell the story you've always wanted to write.

Our national conversation about race is ludicrously out-of-date. Hip-hop is the key to understanding how things are changing. In a provocative book that will appeal to hip-hoppers both black and white and their parents, Bakari Kitwana deftly teases apart the culture of hip-hop to illuminate how race is being lived by young Americans. This topic is ripe, but untried, and Kitwana poses and answers a plethora of questions: Does hip-hop belong to black kids? What in hip-hop appeals to white youth? Is hip-hop different from what rhythm, blues, jazz, and even rock 'n' roll meant to previous generations? How have mass media and consumer culture made hip-hop a unique phenomenon? What does class have to do with it? Are white kids really hip-hop's primary listening audience? How do young Americans think about race, and how has hip-hop influenced their perspective? Are young Americans achieving Martin Luther King, Jr.'s dream through hip-hop? Kitwana addresses uncomfortable truths about America's level of comfort with black people, challenging preconceived notions of race. With this brave tour de force, Bakari Kitwana takes his place alongside the greatest African American intellectuals of the past decades.

The definitions of fatherhood have shifted in the twenty-first century as paternal subjectivities, conflicts, and desires have registered in new ways in the contemporary family. This collection investigates these sites of change through various lenses from popular culture - film, television, blogs, best-selling fiction and non-fiction, stand-up comedy routines, advertisements, newspaper articles, parenting guide-books, and video games. Treating constructions of the father at the nexus of patriarchy, gender, and (post)feminist philosophy, contributors analyze how fatherhood is defined in relation to masculinity and femininity, and the shifting structures of the heteronormative nuclear family. Perceptions of the father as the traditional breadwinner and authoritarian as compared to a more engaged and involved nurturer are considered via representations of fathers from the US, Canada, Britain, Australia, South Africa, and Sweden.

This book charts the complex history of the relationship between the Disney fairy tale and the American Dream, demonstrating the ways in which the Disney fairy tale has been reconstructed and renegotiated alongside, and in response to important changes within American society. In all of its fairy tales of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the Walt Disney studios works to sell its audiences the national myth of the United States at any one historical moment. With analyses of films and television programmes such as The Little Mermaid (1989), Frozen (2013), Beauty and the Beast (2017) and Once Upon a Time (2011-2018), Mollet argues that by giving its fairy tale protagonists characteristics associated with ‘good’ Americans, and even by situating their fairy tales within America itself, Disney constructs a vision of America as a utopian space.

"Subliminal perception debunked, senior citizen advertising comes of age, Mona Lisa goes commercial, and male ad image changes are questioned! These and a host of other insightful, informative essays comprise this volume. Numerous advertising and marketing scholars united to bring the reader some of their most instructive, stimulating and entertaining works." "Advertising today, more than ever, is a field filled with change, challenge, and controversy. For about a decade, the Popular Culture Association's Advertising Area has proved to be a forum for a variety of topics that highlight advertising's impact on culture and society. This volume stems from a proposal to collect into a book some of the papers presented at PCA Conferences in the Advertising Area from 1985-1989. Authors represent a variety of interests and research areas." "While original plans did not call for any specific topic divisions in this volume, the articles do present variety, though somewhat loosely categorized. In general, these categories fall under the broad umbrella of popular culture studies. Besides the familiar historical and critical presentations, articles of controversy and interest are included, such as the one on subliminal advertising. Some of these articles attempt to debunk previously written pieces and serve as a stepping stone to much further discussion." "All-in-all, you will find something to amuse, amaze, inform and stimulate in this volume of advertising variety and versatility."--BOOK JACKET.

Almost immediately after his first appearance in comic books in June 1938, Superman began to be adapted to other media. The subsequent decades have brought even more adaptations of the Man of Steel, his friends, family, and enemies in film, television, comic strip, radio, novels, video games, and even a musical. The rapid adaptation of the Man of Steel occurred before the character and storyworld were fully developed on the comic book page, allowing the adaptations an unprecedented level of freedom and adaptability. The essays in this collection provide specific insight into the practice of adapting Superman from comic books to other media and cultural contexts through a variety of methods, including social, economic, and political contexts. Authors touch on subjects such as the different international receptions to the characters, the evolution of both Clark Kent's character and Superman's powers, the importance of the radio, how the adaptations interact with issues such as racism and Cold War paranoia, and the role of fan fiction in the franchise. By applying a wide range of critical approaches to adaption and Superman, this collection offers new insights into our popular entertainment and our cultural history.

This unique and timely collection examines childhood and the child character throughout Stephen King’s works, from his early novels and short stories, through film adaptations, to his most recent publications. King’s use of child characters within the framework of horror (or of horrific childhood) raises questions about adult expectations of children, childhood, the American family, child agency, and the nature of fear and terror for (or by) children. The ways in which King presents, complicates, challenges, or terrorizes children and notions of childhood provide a unique lens through which to examine American culture, including both adult and social anxieties about children and childhood across the decades of King’s works.

Despite Disney’s carefully crafted image of family friendliness, Gothic elements are pervasive in all of Disney’s productions, ranging from its theme parks to its films and television programs. The contributors to Disney Gothic reveal that the Gothic, in fact, serves as the unacknowledged motor of the Disney machine. Exploring representations of villains, ghosts, and monsters, this book sheds important new light on the role these Gothic elements play throughout the Disney universe in constructing and reinforcing conceptions of normalcy and deviance in relation to shifting understandings of morality, social roles, and identity categories. In doing so, this book raises fascinating questions about the appeal, marketing, and consumption of Gothic horror by adults and particularly by children, who historically have been Disney’s primary audience.