The Need to Improve Discriminatory and Hate Expressions in Early Childhood Education Content

Rising Parental Concerns Over Hate and Discriminatory Expressions
Increased Calls for Voluntary Ethical Guidelines and Production Standards Implementation

Concerns about prejudice, discrimination, and hate speech in recent infant and toddler content have been continuously raised, highlighting the need for improvement. Photo by Getty Images

[Asia Economy Reporter Kim Heeyoon] “I don’t like pink anymore. Pink is for girls.” Kim Mo (43), a parent living in Nowon-gu, Seoul, was surprised when her kindergarten-aged son, who usually liked pink, said he wouldn’t wear pink clothes after watching a cartoon. Kim said this incident made her reflect on the gender-discriminatory depictions in children’s content. She recalled, “In Pororo, which was often shown when my child was young, the character ‘Loopy’ was the only female character and she was pink. Although she didn’t appear often, whenever Loopy appeared, she was mostly shown cooking or knitting for her friends.”

Recently, issues regarding prejudice, discrimination, and hate speech in content for infants and toddlers have been continuously raised. Especially with the increased reliance on educational content due to COVID-19, parents are anxious about their children being exposed to content that could negatively influence fixed stereotypes.

According to a 2018 monitoring project on gender equality in mass media conducted by the Korean Institute for Gender Equality Promotion and Education, 112 children’s programs released on portal sites and children’s channels were monitored. The results showed 54 cases of gender-discriminatory content such as promoting gender role stereotypes, ignoring women’s agency, encouraging appearance-based superiority, and sexualizing women, which was six times higher than the 9 cases of gender-equal content.

The Importance of Proper Ethical Content Education During Early Childhood

Proper learning and experiences during early childhood, when prejudice and stereotypes begin to form, are very important. Nowadays, infants and toddlers who heavily depend on media learn to distinguish right from wrong through books, TV, YouTube, and other content as they communicate with society. Repeated exposure to content filled with gender and stereotype biases can unconsciously teach children to limit themselves. Therefore, the quality of content watched by children, who respond quickly to what they see and hear and have strong imitative tendencies, is increasingly emphasized.

Experts agree that to prevent children with infinite potential from inheriting societal prejudices, it is crucial to provide education through proper ethical content that instills positive perceptions and values.

Education Industry Launches Content Review with Ethical Guidelines

As the need to improve educational content for infants and toddlers arises in response to rapidly changing societal demands and awareness, the education company Daekyo is proactively strengthening the ethical importance in producing educational content. Daekyo, which produces various educational materials including textbooks, series, and educational videos, has established the industry’s first ethical content guidelines and begun a comprehensive review of all educational content. The company explained this is part of ESG management to realize ethical values and fulfill social responsibility.

Daekyo’s ethical content guidelines consist of eight categories: life ethics, gender equality awareness, environmental awareness, safety awareness, diversity awareness, digital ethics, value neutrality, and historical awareness. Based on these guidelines, Daekyo is inspecting and improving all its content, including Noonopi, Chaeehong, and Soluni, from the customer-first perspective to ensure there are no issues of prejudice, discrimination, or hate speech, aiming to provide improved ethical content to customers by early next year, drawing attention.

Calls for establishing control mechanisms over infant and toddler content are growing louder. The government is also aware of the issues. According to a 2014 monitoring report by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, among 128 cases including 34 children’s books, 40 video contents, 38 webtoons, and 16 apps, there were 1,008 instances (88.3%) of elements hindering gender equality awareness, overwhelmingly more than the 133 instances (11.7%) of elements promoting gender equality awareness.

Experts point out that beyond relying on voluntary improvement efforts by the education and content industries, institutional measures such as expert reviews after content production or forming monitoring groups centered on parents to approve content posting after review are urgently needed.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.