'It helps people make their decisions' - Dating games, public service broadcasting and the negotiation of identity in middle-childhood

Drawing on qualitative data from a study carried out with over 1300 childre n aged between 5 and 13, in England and Wales, the article analyses childre n's discourse about television programmes. The article addresses the persis tent tendency of this discourse to express socially responsible and public service values in evaluating programmes. This finding is explained both in terms of children's ability to adapt to the requirements of the public cons ultation task they were taking part in, and in terms of their obvious abili ty to access different kinds of adult discourse available in the culture at large - in particular various representations of childhood expressed in po licy and regulatory documents, and in literature.