During school holidays as a young kid in the late 80s/early 90s, I watched a lot of Donahue. The bespectacled TV talk show host would be on my screen talking to his guests and the studio audience about topics that were no way suitable for my 10-year-old ears.
Famously, Phil Donahue’s talk show was a socially progressive and provocative TV show that brought some complicated, taboo topics to audiences who were often not used to the open and frank way they were discussed on screen. Donahue got away with it as a conservative-looking, mid-western guy who could talk to middle America just as comfortably as talking to sophisticated coastal audiences.
A good example of the progressiveness of the show was a 1982 episode where Phil Donahue presented an hour-long panel chat on his show about AIDS, several years before it was seen as a national health crisis.
At the time of broadcast, AIDS was an issue still only being reported on with seriousness by gay street press publications.
This was not typical television fare.
It would also be misleading to suggest that Donahue was a virtuous, truth-seeking educator. Yes, his shows would address topics like sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, civil rights, consumer protections, abortion, atheism, and race relations. But often his shows could be pretty shameless, with sleazy conversations about topics like safe-sex orgies or why a person may dress up as a baby for sexual pleasure.
As a ten year-old, I was being educated on adult concerns. It was an age where I was looking externally beyond my family to make sense of the world and every afternoon the silver-haired Donahue was there to offer insight. For better and, almost certainly, for worse.
Phil Donahue died earlier this week. Aged 88, he was survived by his wife (vocal feminist Marlo Thomas and star of 60s sitcom That Girl) and children. With his passing, I began to consider his role in my education about social issues.
As kids, we do look for guidance and education from all manner of sources. While parents may try to control the media kids consume, they’re still likely to be drawn to unexpected places and unexpected educators. Would my parents have approved of what I was watching on Donahue a lot of the time? Probably not. But it made me a better, more interesting person for being exposed to it.
An education in perspective
In seeking an understanding of adult concepts and a view of life outside of my family, what I was seeking was an education in perspective.
Developing an education in perspective is developing brain function related to empathy and understanding. It’s a social-emotional-intellectual skill.
Michigan State University has published a guide to helping kids learn about keeping perspective. It advises parents:
- Walk the walk. Young children learn by watching you, so when you show them the value of perspective taking, they will engage in it too.
- Talk about feelings. Talk about all feelings with your child and teach them that all feelings are valid.
- Acknowledge and respect feelings. Engage with your child and reflect their feelings back to them, let them know you notice them and are there to help them.
- Show them the other side. When you see a stranger stop to help someone on the street, talk to your child about what each person might be feeling or thinking. Help them build connections between people’s actions and their motivations.
- Train your little detective. Just like real-life detectives search for clues to solve a crime, people who are skilled at perspective taking look for clues to understand other people.
- Encourage community Encourage your child not only to engage with others, but to work together, collaborate, problem solve and truly value their relationships with others.
- Create a loving and warm environment. When children are loved, respected and feel safe, they have the capacity and motivation to learn how to understand and respect the perspectives of others.
An education in media
We all set boundaries in our own lives, whether we are conscious of doing it or not. We set expectations for ourselves between what is and isn’t permissible.
Kids are figuring that out. They are building the tools that they will need in life to understand where they want to set those boundaries for themselves and how that aligns with community expectation. Kids will look to the examples set by their parents, other family members, educations, and others in their community for that guidance. They will also take examples set by the media they consume.
In thinking about my own media consumption by watching shows like Donahue, I was seeking a better understanding of a world that seemed to exist outside of my own. What were adults doing and talking about when I wasn’t around? And how acceptable were their actions and perspectives when measured against the boundaries set by the broader community.
Was what I was watching appropriate for a 10 year-old? Perhaps not at face-value, but my interest at that age was perfectly normal.
John Mayer, a clinical psychologist and author of Family Fit: Find Your Balance in Life, was interviewed by PopSugar and explained “It’s been my experience that this is most common between the ages of 10 and 11.”
This is an age where kids start to seek out adult content to better contextualise the world. This is the age where they will seek more adult content from media, stumble onto things you’d be shocked by online, and start paying more attention to habits in your household. “There are also common gender differences: girls often become curious earlier than boys,” Mayer said.
In the last few days, I have rewatched several episodes of Donahue on YouTube and am shocked that I was watching this as a kid. But I also know that if I was a kid in 2024, I would probably be seeking out this sort of information and perspective via YouTube and other online channels.
I’m thankful that I had an educator like my TV friend Phil Donahue to steer me through understanding the world.
