The Entertainment Industry's Effect on Children (continued)

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On the positive side, electronic media provide children with opportunities to practice skills, solve problems, create illustrations and graphs, and expand their knowledge base. For example, some primary-school children use the Internet to practice chess, send e-mail, and retrieve information from Internet bulletin boards. We can best assess the impact of these media on children’s learning by observing how children use them.

When parents and other adults watch DVDs or television or use the computer with children, the children benefit more from the programs and the adults learn more about the children. Adults discover what children know and what interests or bores them. The adults may then act to enhance their children’s learning. Adults may introduce children to the original stories from which the TV programs were adapted, helping them to learn to make comparisons and develop better discrimination skills about stories and presentations. For children to be engaged in positive learning, it seems urgent that schools, parents, teachers, and other concerned individuals develop partnerships for interpreting and dealing with the products of both currently available media sources and those soon to appear in their communities (Murray, 1997; Paik, 2001). Helping children develop skills as critical consumers of media (Hesse & Lane, 2003) can help to reverse the negative influences of the media industry. Communities’ influences on children’s learning vary, but community programs, such as museums, zoos, and recreational services broaden children’s perspectives.

When Meringoff (1980) compared children’s reactions to stories presented through television, books, and radio, children seemed to view television events as something not directly associated with themselves, but they appeared to personalize the events in books. Berns (2006) and Singer and Singer (2001) surmised that because the reader is more intimately involved in the book, it is a stronger socializing agent. However, the stronger personal influence of printed materials over television or the Internet could also reflect the manner in which the two are presented to children (Neuman, 1995). Young children first know about books because someone reads to them and interacts with them about the story, whereas more often than not children are left to watch television or to use computer games by themselves. We know that children are socialized on how to react to books; thus, they get more personal meaning from them as they become readers themselves. Some researchers (Desmond, 2001; Neuman, 1997) suggest that when parents or other adults interact with children viewing television or using the computer, those children develop better interactive and processing skills.

The entertainment industry influences the actions, dress codes, and values of many adults. It also captures and holds children’s interests for a large part of each day. As a teacher or community worker, you must understand that this influence on children both enhances and inhibits their growth as human beings. You should not underestimate the effect of this influence but rather try to incorporate it into your teaching or advising so that children assimilate it in a healthy context with the rest of their education. For example, knowledge that children pick up from TV can be startling but relevant, and schools, communities, and families may reinforce the unexpected learning in positive ways.