Children Now

Children Now is a national organization dedicated to making children's needs a top public policy priority. For more than 12 years, the Children and the Media Program at Children Now has worked to ensure that all children have access to a media environment that supports their healthy cognitive, social, and emotional development. As a leading public policy player in the field of children and the media, Children Now has played an important role in major policy issues that range from the V-chip and the television ratings system to the Children's Television Act and digital television. Children Now also has testified before the Federal Communications Commission and the Senate Commerce Committee on topics such as the impact of media consolidation on children's programming and how the TV ratings system could better serve families. Its work is supported through foundation grants (90%) and individual donors (10%).

Children Now recognizes that the media industry, parents and caregivers, federal regulators, and policy-makers each have a role to play in creating a healthy media environment for children. To raise awareness and inspire action from each of these groups, Children Now conducts groundbreaking, timely research on media issues affecting children.

Research conducted by Children Now includes “A Different World,” which studied the messages about racial and gender diversity that are sent to boys and girls across a range of media and the impacts those messages have on young viewers; “Big Media, Little Kids,” which revealed the harmful effects of media consolidation on children's programming; and “Fair Play? Violence, Race, and Gender in Video Games,” which found that an overwhelming majority of popular games contained significant amounts of violence and that the ratings for these games often did not acknowledge the violent content.

Children Now uses this research to educate each group of stakeholders and to provide resources and tools to enable them to make programming, viewing, and policy decisions that support children's healthy development. This strategy has enabled Children Now to win significant victories for children. Its research on the importance of racial and gender diversity to children and subsequent outreach to media industry leaders resulted in creation of Dora the Explorer, the first Latina, bilingual heroine in children's programming, and one of the most popular children's television characters in history.

Children Now's research on the detrimental effects of media consolidation on the quantity and accessibility of children's programming prompted the Federal Communications Commission to include a stipulation in their 2003 media ownership ruling protecting children from the likely harmful outcomes of media deregulation. In 2004, Children Now won a landmark victory for children and families when the Federal Communications Commission unanimously approved its recommendations regarding new rules for children's television. The new rules ensure that children have access to more educational programming and that parents have more information about how to find that programming as television transitions from an analog to a digital format.