Framing kids: children, immigration reform, and same-sex marriage

Children often have played crucial roles - both as political symbols and frontline activists - in the struggles of marginalized groups to secure basic membership rights. This was true of the African American civil rights movement and labor movement in earlier eras, and as this article illuminates, children are prominent in current battles for immigrant and LGBTQ rights. In particular, this article focuses on the ways children are framed in contemporary's policy debates over immigration reform and same-sex marriage to advance distinctive political interests and agendas. Employing original content analysis of how the media covered these two contentious issues, we find that both advocates and opponents of expanding the membership rights of undocumented immigrants and LGBTQ people regularly invoked child-centered frames in their public discourse but they do so in markedly different ways. These include striking contrasts in the construction of narratives about "real" versus "abstract" children and about "our kids" and "their kids." More generally, this study underscores the need for more scholarship that considers how childhood status intersects with a variety of other critical identities in American political life.