It has become increasingly common in some academic circles to write off public controversies about children”s media as moral panics. This paper sets out to challenge the implied claim made in this argument that media do not have psychological and cultural impacts on children. This position confuses public concerns with public safety and children”s well

In Leo Kanner’s now classic 1943 paper he outlined the behavior pattern, present from early in life, which he named ‘early infantile autism’. Prior to this, there were, in the literature, occasional accounts of individual children whose behavior fitted the picture Kanner later described. Kanner described only the autistic children referred to his clinic and,