Child Development - Chapter 16.pdf - po ang - Januszek66

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CHAPTER 16

Beyond Family

and Peers

TELEVISION

Children’s Comprehension of Television Programs

Television’s Influence on Cognitive and Language

Development

Television’s Influence on Social Development

R ESEARCH A PPLIED TO P ARENTING : Encouraging Critical Skills

in Television Viewing

COMPUTERS

Academic Mastery and Cognition

Social Development

C ONTROVERSY : What Regulations Should Exist for Children’s

Access to the Internet?

Sex Differences

SCHOOL

E XAMINING R ESEARCH M ETHODS : Interpreting

Cross-Cultural Test Results

Families and Peers as Agents Mediating School

Achievement

School and Classroom Size

School Transitions

Teachers: Key Agents of Influence

Cultural Differences in School Achievement

A TYPICAL D EVELOPMENT : Educating Youths with Serious

Emotional Disturbances

School Violence

NEIGHBORHOODS

Do Neighborhoods Matter?

War and Children

CHAPTER RECAP

Summary of Developmental Themes

Summary of Topics

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Key Themes in Media, Computers, Schools,

and Neighborhoods

Sociocultural Influence How does the sociocul-

tural context influence the child’s experiences with

media, computers, schools, and the neighborhood?

Interaction Among Domains How do the

child’s experiences with media, computers, schools,

and the neighborhood interact with development in

other domains?

■

Child’s Active Role How does the child play an

active role in experiences with media, computers,

schools, and the neighborhood?

■

J eremy slammed the door behind him, flicked the lock, and headed to the refrigerator.

It was his regular routine after school. Come home, get a snack, and turn on the tele-

vision to watch cartoons. He wasn’t allowed to go out to play; too dangerous, his

mother claimed. If he had already seen the cartoons, he might play a video game for

awhile. But because he couldn’t have anyone over until his mother returned from work,

that wasn’t much fun, either. He dreamed of living in a house with a big yard, maybe

even a swimming pool in the back and a park nearby. But that wasn’t the neighborhood

he was living in.

C hildren grow up in many different contexts. In contrast to Jeremy, some go to

soccer practice or music lessons after school or stay at the school until a par-

ent picks them up an hour or two later. Some spend their time chatting on the com-

puter with their friends. Some, like Jeremy, watch a lot of television.

Historically, of course, parents and peers have played a major role in socializing

children and helping them build their cognitive skills, and they continue to serve this

function in contemporary society. Nevertheless, formal education in the schools and,

in more recent decades, computers and the information highway, along with televi-

sion, videocassette and digital recorders, and computer activities have begun to play

a significant part in these processes as well.

A host of questions have sprung up concerning television, computers, and other

recent technological marvels and their effects on children. What are children learn-

ing from these increasingly ubiquitous sources of information? Do they get “hooked”

on television and computer games? What aspects of cognitive or social development

might these cultural innovations be affecting? In addition, schools have both peda-

gogical and social effects on development. Questions about academic and social suc-

cess and their relationship to the programs that schools offer, as well as the role of

teachers in these processes, continue to be of concern to parents and educators. Fi-

nally, neighborhoods offer a means of further exploring potential influences of the

broader context in which children live.

Television

A merican children watch a great deal of television. Babies as young as six

months of age attend to television and on average are exposed to more than

one hour per day (Hollenbeck & Slaby, 1979). As Figure 16.1 shows, the time chil-

dren spend attending to television increases dramatically during the preschool years,

especially after age two-and-a-half, peaks between ages ten to twelve, and declines

during adolescence, when radio listening increases (D. R. Anderson et al., 1986;

Brown et al., 1990; Calvert et al., 1982). Children, at least in the United States, spend

S EE F OR Y OUR SE LF

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Children and Media

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Television

FIGURE 16.1

Hours of TV Watching as a

Function of Children’s Age

The amount of time children

spend watching television

increases throughout early

childhood, peaks at about age

ten or twelve years, and then

declines in adolescence.

Age in years

Source: Adapted from Liebert & Sprafkin, 1988.

more time watching television than at any other activity except sleep (Roberts et al.,

1999). In fact, by high school graduation, three years will, on average, have been given

to watching television (Strasburger, 1993). Moreover, with the advent of cable televi-

sion, videocassette recorders (VCR), and digital games, children have more opportu-

nities than ever to spend time in front of a television screen.

Te levision viewing among children shows large individual differences. Some

three- to five-year-olds watch very little television; others watch as much as seventy-

five hours per week. Individual patterns of TV viewing remain stable over the years.

Thus the television-viewing habits children acquire in early childhood can be rela-

tively long lasting (Huston & Wright, 1998).

As they grow older, children also show changes in the types of programs they

prefer to watch. Preschoolers are more likely to view educational programs de-

signed for children, such as Sesame Street or Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, and car-

toons. Interest in child-centered educational programs is relatively greater among

younger preschoolers than older children (Wright et al., 2001). By ages five to

seven, children begin to watch comedies and entertainment shows aimed at gen-

eral audiences, shows that make increasing demands on their ability to compre-

hend plots and themes (Huston et al., 1990). Boys tend to watch more television

than girls (Huston & Wright, 1998) and African American children more than Eu-

ropean American children (Comstock, 1991). Children from lower socioeconomic

levels are more frequent viewers than children from higher-income backgrounds

(Greenberg, 1986).

Children’s Comprehension of Television Programs

Contrary to popular belief, television viewing is usually not a passive process in

which a mesmerized child sits gazing at the screen. The fact that preferences for

shows change with age is just one example of the ways children actively control their

TV viewing. Daniel Anderson and his colleagues have conducted numerous studies

demonstrating that children’s selection of television programs is influenced by their

ability to comprehend content (Anderson & Burns, 1991). Certain formal, or struc-

tural, features of television serve to draw the viewer in, particularly such sound

effects as laughter, music, and children’s and women’s voices. Other features, such as

visual cuts, motion, and special sound effects, hold the child’s attention (Alwitt et al.,

1980; Schmitt, Anderson, & Collins, 1999). But the formal features of television pro-

grams are not the sole determinants of what children watch.

When preschoolers watch segments of Sesame Street in which the comprehensi-

bility of the program has been altered, that is, presented in a foreign language or

played backward, attention declines even though the formal features remain constant

(Anderson et al., 1981). In other words, children actively direct their attention to

KEY THEME

Child’s Active Role

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Chapter 16

Beyond Family and Peers

Young children in most families

spend many hours watching

television. As a consequence,

television can have a powerful

influence on their develop-

ment. According to some

estimates, as much as one-

third of a child’s waking life

will have been spent watching

television, and a good portion

of the programming young

children see will be cartoons.

those portions of the show that they most readily understand; they are not influ-

enced by sound effects or visual cuts alone. Many television shows have complex

plots and use subtle cues that require inferences about characters’ motives, inten-

tions, and feelings. In addition, most programs contain changes of scene that require

viewers to integrate information across several scenes. Research indicates that clear

developmental differences exist in children’s ability to understand information from

television shows, differences that accompany changes in cognitive processing.

Preschoolers can understand short story segments and remember the most cen-

tral elements of each story (Lorch, Bellack, & Augsbach, 1987). When the plots and

themes of television shows thicken, however, young children have difficulties. More

specifically, when they watch programs designed for general audiences, younger chil-

dren are less likely than older children to remember the explicit content, that is, the

discrete scenes that are essential to understanding the plot. Even when they do re-

member explicit information, younger children frequently fail to grasp the implicit

content communicated by relationships among scenes (Collins et al., 1978). For ex-

ample, young children may fail to understand a character’s motive for aggression if

the message is communicated in two scenes separated by several other sequences

(Collins, 1983).

Children’s general knowledge and previous experiences can affect their compre-

hension of the programs they watch. Suppose, for example, that children are asked to

retell the content of a show about a murder and the suspect’s eventual capture. Chil-

dren frequently mention script-based knowledge (see the chapter titled “Cognition:

Information Processing”), drawing from their general storehouse of information on

the events that surround the relationships between police and criminals. Older chil-

KEY THEME

Interaction Among Domains

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Television

dren are more likely than younger children, however, to describe content specific to

the program they watched, such as the fact that some police officers in the show did

not wear uniforms (Collins, 1983). As children’s general knowledge about the world

grows, their comprehension of more detailed, specific information in television pro-

grams expands as well.

Other research has shown that children’s growing verbal competency underlies

their ability to understand TV programs. When five-year-olds were given standard-

ized IQ tests and tested on their memory of the central and incidental events in a

thirty-five-minute television program, their scores on the verbal subscales of the tests

correlated significantly with their ability to comprehend the show’s central events

(Jacobvitz, Wood, & Albin, 1989).

One other important developmental change is in children’s ability to recognize

that most television programming is fictional. Children under four years of age often

have difficulty distinguishing the boundaries between events that occur on television

and those that take place in the real world (Flavell et al., 1990; Jaglom & Gardner,

1981). For example, preschoolers may think that Sesame Street is a place where oth-

ers live, that individuals portrayed on television can see and hear their viewers, and

that the things seen on TV exist inside it (Nikken & Peeters, 1988). Nevertheless, not

until they are older than two years of age do children seem to realize that informa-

tion presented on television can help them solve a problem such as finding a toy in a

room after having just seen someone on television hiding it in that room (Schmitt &

Anderson, 2002; Troseth & DeLoache, 1998).

Many five- and six-year-olds do not fully understand that television characters are

actually actors playing roles; not until age eight and older do the majority of children

grasp this concept. However, even kindergartners realize that cartoons are fantasy.

They are also quite accurate about deciding whether their favorite programs occur as

part of real life or just on television. In fact, they tend to be biased in assuming that

most television programming does not occur in real life (Wright et al., 1994). Thus

the developmental course seems to progress from failing to make a distinction

between events on television and events in the real world to a belief that few events

depicted on television occur in the real world to, finally, a more complete under-

standing of which events occurring on television are fictional and which are not

(Wright et al., 1994).

Television’s Influence on Cognitive and Language Development

To day many preschoolers in the United States and most Western countries have

ready access to programs specifically designed to teach cognitive skills to preschool

children. But they also learn a lot more, according to research on educational televi-

sion. Evaluations of the effects of such shows as Sesame Street demonstrate that tele-

vision can teach children a range of problem-solving, mathematical, reading, and

language skills (Huston & Wright, 1998).

KEY THEME

Interaction Among Domains

● Cognition Sesame Street was specifically designed to provide entertaining ways to

teach children, especially those who might be underprepared for school, the letters of

the alphabet, counting, vocabulary, and similar school-readiness skills. The programs

also deliberately include both male and female characters from many racial and ethnic

backgrounds. Preschoolers, many from disadvantaged backgrounds, who watched the

show most frequently were found to show the greatest gains on several skills, including

writing their names and knowing letters, numbers, and forms (see Figure 16.2). Fre-

quent viewers also obtained higher scores on a standardized vocabulary test, adapted

better to school, and had more positive attitudes toward school and people of other

races than nonwatchers (Bogatz & Ball, 1972; Rice et al., 1990). Thus the show had ef-

fects not only on children’s cognitive skills but also on their prosocial attitudes.

Not only does educational programming have immediate effects on children’s

cognitive abilities, but evidence is also accumulating to indicate that these effects can

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