Making the moral of the story stick − a media psychologist explains the research behind ‘Sesame Street,’ ‘Arthur’ and other children’s TV
This article originally appearded on The Conversation on February 23, 2024.
To adult viewers, educational media content for children, such as “Sesame Street” or “Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood,” may seem rather simplistic. The pacing is slow, key themes are often repeated and the visual aspects tend to be plain.
However, many people might be surprised to learn about the sheer amount of research that goes into the design choices many contemporary programs use.
For more than a decade, I have studied just that: how to design media to support children’s learning, particularly in moral development. My research, along with the work of many others, shows that children can learn important developmental and social skills through media.
History of research on children’s media
Research on how to design children’s media to support learning is not new.
When “Sesame Street” debuted in November 1969, it began a decadeslong practice of testing its content before airing it to ensure children learned the intended messages of each episode and enjoyed watching it. Some episodes included messages notoriously difficult to teach to young children, including lessons about death, divorce and racism.
Researchers at the Sesame Workshop hold focus groups at local preschools where participating children watch or interact with Sesame content. They test the children on whether they are engaged with, pay attention to and learn the intended message of the content. If the episode passes the test, then it moves on to the next stage of production.
If children do not learn the intended message, or are not engaged and attentive, then the episode goes back for editing. In some cases, such as a 1992 program designed to teach children about divorce, the entire episode is scrapped. In this case, children misunderstood some key information about divorce. “Sesame Street” did not include divorce in its content until 2012.
Designing children’s media
With help from the pioneering research of “Sesame Street,” along with research from other children’s television shows both in the industry and in academia, the past few decades have seen many new insights on how best to design media to promote children’s learning. These strategies are still shaping children’s shows today.
For example, you may have noticed that some children’s television characters speak directly to the camera and pause for the child viewer at home to yell out an answer to their question. This design strategy, known as participatory cues, is famously used by the shows “Blue’s Clues” and “Dora the Explorer.” Researchers found that participatory cues in TV are linked to increased vocabulary learning and content comprehension among young children. They also increase children’s engagement with the educational content of the show over time, particularly as they learn the intended lesson and can give the character the correct answer.
You may have also noticed that children’s media often features jokes that seem to be aimed more at adults. These are often commentary about popular culture that require context children might not be aware of or involve more complex language that children might not understand. This is because children are more likely to learn when a supportive adult or older sibling is watching the show alongside them and helping explain or connect it to the child’s life. Known as active mediation, research has shown that talking about the goals, emotions and behaviors of media characters can help children learn from them and even improve aspects of their own emotional and social development.
Programs have also incorporated concrete examples of desired behaviors, such as treating a neurodiverse character fairly, rather than discussing the behaviors more abstractly. This is because children younger than about age 7 struggle with abstract thinking and may have difficulty generalizing content they learned from media and applying it to their own lives.
Research on an episode of “Arthur” found that a concrete example of a main character experiencing life through the eyes of another character with Asperger’s syndrome improved the ability of child viewers to take another person’s perspective. It also increased the nuance of their moral judgments and moral reasoning. Just a single viewing of that one episode can positively influence several aspects of a child’s cognitive and moral development.
Teaching inclusion through media
One skill that has proven difficult to teach children through media is inclusivity. Multiple studies have shown that children are more likely to exclude others from their social group after viewing an episode explicitly designed to promote inclusion.
For example, an episode of “Clifford the Big Red Dog” involved Clifford and his family moving to a new town. The townspeople initially did not want to include Clifford because he was too big, but they eventually learned the importance of getting to know others before making judgments about them. However, watching this episode did not make children more likely to play with or view disabled or overweight children favorably.
Based on my own work, I argue that one reason inclusivity can be difficult to teach in children’s TV may be due to how narratives are structured. For example, many shows actually model antisocial behaviors during the first three-quarters of the episode before finally modeling prosocial behaviors at the end. This may inadvertently teach the wrong message, because children tend to focus on the behaviors modeled for the majority of the program.
My team and I conducted a recent study showing that including a 30-second clip prior to the episode that explains the inclusive message to children before they view the content can help increase prosocial behaviors and decrease stigmatization. Although this practice might not be common in children’s TV at the moment, adult viewers can also fill this role by explaining the intended message of inclusivity to children before watching the episode.
Parenting with media
Children’s media is more complex than many people think. Although there is certainly a lot of media out there that may not use study-informed design practices, many shows do use research to ensure children have the best chance to learn from what they watch.
It can be difficult to be a parent or a child in a media-saturated world, particularly in deciding when children should begin to watch media and which media they should watch. But there are relatively simple strategies parents and supportive adults can use to leverage media to support their child’s healthy development and future.
Parents and other adults can help children learn from media by watching alongside them and answering their questions. They can also read reviews of media to determine its quality and age appropriateness. Doing so can help children consume media in a healthy way.
We live in a media-saturated world, and restricting young children’s media use is difficult for most families. With just a little effort, parents can model healthy ways to use media for their children and select research-informed media that promotes healthy development and well-being among the next generation.
Associate Professor of Communication, University of California, Davis
Ph.D. Candidate in Communication, University of California, Davis
Ph.D. Candidate in Communication, University of California, Davis
Ph.D. Candidate in Communication, University of California, Davis
This article originally appearded on The Conversation on February 23, 2024.
What’s Your Money Story?
One of my first students at Pockets Change told me, “If I don’t have a plan for my money, my money’s gonna have a plan for me.”
It’s a simple statement that also happens to be some of the best financial advice I’ve ever heard.
We start forming relationships with money between 3-7 years old; while we’re listening to Elmo sing about getting new shoes or sneaking to the doorway as our parents watch Succession. Fictional characters’ wants and needs fill more than screens; they shape our financial narratives.
Across storylines, characters exemplify money personalities in action. Every iteration of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles spends their (literally) hard fought loot on pizza, but each member embodies distinct habits & tendencies. That’s why our multigenerational Hip Hop & Finance programs start with finding your money personality. We use a simple, 2 question money personality quiz to determine one of four money personalities. The questions are rooted in financial psychology and behavioral economics.
Through money personalities, Students, teachers, and family members of all ages have been able to forgive themselves and move forward. The 4 personalities are full of relatable tendencies that make sense of the seemingly irrational ways we deal with money. Do you only buy things on sale? You may be a complicator! Do you end up blowing the big check you just got because it was from an Evil Corporation? You might be a money monk.
The money havers and knowers love telling young adults about the necessity and urgency of making a financial plan. Set long term goals, invest for your future, make a vision board, max out your 401k, build generational wealth.
Save, invest, and protect the right percentages of your wages, advocate for raises, stick to your plan, and everybody will be wealthy and we’ll have world peace. Do the right thing? Spike Lee made a film about how easy it is to do that.
It’s why many officials want financial education taught as a part of math class. Hard work + discipline = success… except when it doesn’t.
There’s no mathematical or magical formula for perfecting our finances. Budgets are personal and cash flow projections are literal guesses. If all that seems fake, and made up, good! So is money.
Take a breath. [Editor's note: ‘take a breath’ is the definition of inspiration]
Money is about more than numbers, it’s a tool to create change. As storytellers, content creators, and community builders we have a tremendous power to deconstruct money myths and cultivate empathy for the financial exploitation, discrimination, and oppression young adults are being called to navigate.
Our research partner, Knology, found Pockets Change’s approach highly effective in building financial resilience through hip hop pedagogy. Through shared practices and resources we have meaningful money conversations across mediums.
Storytelling creates a transformative space for real, open, and empowering conversations about money. As our students explore their own relationships with money, multimedia creates paths to overcome obstacles, encourage empathy, engage curiosity, and envision possibilities.
Our shared money stories shift narratives that have held back our communities for generations. We encourage content creators and program leaders to reflect on where financial themes could enrich their next project.
Bring Money Stories to Life with Actionable Insights:
Expand storytelling beyond the “middle–class centric” values and assumptions too often depicted. Explore the breadth and depth of how our relationships with money show up.
Share empowering stories of navigating uncertainty and enhancing financial wellbeing even when money is scarce or employment precarious.
Promote self-acceptance and efficacy with the message that “whatever it is you have; these are the ways that you’re able to save and this is what you’re able to do to grow.” As one individual told us, the program approach was valuable because it taught youth how “not to have money control you.”
Rethinking the Digital Detox: How Platforms Can Help Us Achieve Media Balance
I first learned about the concept of digital detox from a YouTube video in which a young tech executive documents his experience with “dopamine fasting”. I came across this concept again in a book I read earlier this year titled The Information Diet, which outlines steps people can take to orient their consumption of media in a healthier direction. While the associations with the terms “detox” or even “diet” are problematic, both properly shed light on this idea that to be healthy media consumers we need to regulate the kinds and amounts of content we consume each day.
The term “digital balance” is much improved because it presents this idea of portion-control and variety in media consumption without the connotation that it ought to be drastic, short-lived, and unsustainable. In a paper out of the Atlantic Marketing Journal, researchers discuss the challenge of navigating our modern media landscape as a “balancing act”, which requires us to understand the nature of different media and their implicit motivations. In the broadest sense, this balance involves three main categories: entertainment-based media, educational media, and screen-free media, each of which offers a distinct form of value to consumers. And even as the lines between entertainment and education continue to blur, with the so-called rise of infotainment, these categories can help us—and our kids especially—to become more mindful media consumers, aware of the importance of variety and apportionment of digital content.
As communications scholar Neil Postman suggests, as the availability of digital media increases, and as this media becomes increasingly entertainment-driven, it becomes increasingly important to moderate the kinds of content that kids can access. For excesses in screen-based entertainment, he argues, can hinder people’s ability to contextualize information and develop the skills to follow complex linear narratives. Similarly, as a paper out of the International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction suggests, spending too much time on television and video games, without supplemental education-based or typographic content, can result in slowed learning. Moreover, the fact that these impacts of entertainment-dominated media are critically understudied means that we should be particularly cautious of such drastic increases in our uptake of digital entertainment.
Still, balance also means that entertainment-based media can be okay when consumed in healthy proportion to education-based media and off-screen media like reading. In fact, and as reflected in the Surgeon General’s recent advisory on social media and mental health, entertainment-based social media can help contribute to important feelings of connection with others. Media balance is therefore not about labeling individual pieces of content as good or bad, but about figuring out how to moderate the amount of entertainment-based media we consume while ensuring enough time for educational content and screen-free activities.
Yet media companies aren’t always making it easy for us to do this. The supremacy of entertainment-based media over other media forms, especially paper-based typographic media, narrows the media landscape to a dangerous degree. It’s almost as if today’s media consumers are now shopping exclusively at supermarkets that sell only pasta. Sure, it’s great for one-stop shopping before noodle night, but not exactly ideal for those who want to hit all the food groups. Which is why to help people find media balance, especially porous populations like kids, media companies can play an important role by balancing the media supply in this same way. Just as you can find fruits and proteins and dairy at the supermarket, media companies can help ensure that we have the variety of content that makes media balance possible in the first place.
Entertainment can evidently be found in nearly all media, and there is even research to suggest that it can play an important role in helping kids to process information. But when content offers nothing else besides entertainment, it’s hard to obtain the full scope of cognitive value that media can help us develop. To be clear, I’m not talking about infotainment or other entertainment-as-education conglomerates. I’m talking about the kind of content that offers nothing in the way of learning, morality, or representation; the stuff that is designed solely to divert attention towards the screen. Having media balance can be attained only when content makers and content consumers recognize the importance of keeping this supply of pure entertainment in proportion with educational content and everything else in between. The entertainment industry in particular can do this in four primary ways:
Bolstering its collection of educational content
Clearly denoting when content is designed to be educational
Enabling users to search specifically for more educational content
Implementing features that promote greater portion control
When we reconceptualize the concept of digital detox as a more long-term pursuit of balance, we recognize that what’s most important is the collection of our media experiences and not individual pieces of content in isolation. Kids especially can benefit from this notion of balance that complements what they already know about nutrition. Given that our current media landscape tends to skew this balance in favor of entertainment, which carries non-trivial cognitive risks, media platforms should feel empowered to make it easier for people, especially kids, to achieve media balance. And they can do this by maintaining a greater supply of educational content and making it easier for us to portion out how much content we want to consume at any given time. Similarly, we should continue to show kids the importance of screen-free media like reading, which promotes different forms of cognitive development and properly complements other forms of digital media, which are ultimately here to stay.
With proper media balance, we can feel good knowing that we are getting many different kinds of value out of the digital content we consume. And technology platforms are the perfect partners to help us reach these new ideals about balance in the digital age. After all, it’s hard to make it in the world on just pasta.
Why are sitcom dads still so inept?
This article originally appeared on The Conversation June 16, 2020.
From Homer Simpson to Phil Dunphy, sitcom dads have long been known for being bumbling and inept.
But it wasn’t always this way. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, sitcom dads tended to be serious, calm and wise, if a bit detached. In a shift that media scholars have documented, only in later decades did fathers start to become foolish and incompetent.
And yet the real-world roles and expectations of fathers have changed in recent years. Today’s dads are putting more time into caring for their children and see that role as more central to their identity.
Have today’s sitcoms kept up?
I study gender and the media, and I specialize in depictions of masculinity. In a study I did in 2020, my co-authors and I systematically look at the ways in which portrayals of sitcom fathers have and haven’t changed.
Why sitcom portrayals matter
Fictional entertainment can shape our views of ourselves and others. To appeal to broad audiences, sitcoms often rely on the shorthand assumptions that form the basis of stereotypes. Whether it’s the way they portray gay masculinity in “Will and Grace” or the working class in “Roseanne,” sitcoms often mine humor from certain norms and expectations associated with gender, sexual identity and class.
When sitcoms stereotype fathers, they seem to suggest that men are somehow inherently ill-suited for parenting. That sells actual fathers short and, in heterosexual, two-parent contexts, it reinforces the idea that mothers should take on the lion’s share of parenting responsibilities.
It was Tim Allen’s role as Tim “the Tool Man” Taylor of the 1990s series “Home Improvement” that inspired my initial interest in sitcom dads. Tim was goofy and childish, whereas Jill, his wife, was always ready – with a disapproving scowl, a snappy remark and seemingly endless stores of patience – to bring him back in line. The pattern matched an observation made by TV Guide television critic Matt Roush, who, in 2010, wrote, “It used to be that father knew best, and then we started to wonder if he knew anything at all.”
I published my first quantitative study on the depiction of sitcom fathers in 2001, focusing on jokes involving the father. I found that, compared with older sitcoms, dads in more recent sitcoms were the butt of the joke more frequently. Mothers, on the other hand, became less frequent targets of mockery over time. I viewed this as evidence of increasingly feminist portrayals of women that coincided with their growing presence in the workforce.
Studying the disparaged dad
In our new study, we wanted to focus on sitcom dads’ interactions with their children, given how fatherhood has changed in American culture.
We used what’s called “quantitative content analysis,” a common research method in communication studies. To conduct this sort of analysis, researchers develop definitions of key concepts to apply to a large set of media content. Researchers employ multiple people as coders who observe the content and individually track whether a particular concept appears.
For example, researchers might study the racial and ethnic diversity of recurring characters on Netflix original programs. Or they might try to see whether demonstrations are described as “protests” or “riots” in national news.
For our study, we identified 34 top-rated, family-centered sitcoms that aired from 1980 to 2017 and randomly selected two episodes from each. Next, we isolated 578 scenes in which the fathers were involved in “disparagement humor,” which meant the dads either made fun of another character or were made fun of themselves.
Then we studied how often sitcom dads were shown together with their kids within these scenes in three key parenting interactions: giving advice, setting rules or positively or negatively reinforcing their kids’ behavior. We wanted to see whether the interaction made the father look “humorously foolish” – showing poor judgment, being incompetent or acting childishly.
Interestingly, fathers were shown in fewer parenting situations in more recent sitcoms. And when fathers were parenting, it was depicted as humorously foolish in just over 50% of the relevant scenes in the 2000s and 2010s, compared with 18% in the 1980s and 31% in the 1990s sitcoms.
At least within scenes featuring disparagement humor, sitcom audiences, more often than not, are still being encouraged to laugh at dads’ parenting missteps and mistakes.
Fueling an inferiority complex?
The degree to which entertainment media reflect or distort reality is an enduring question in communication and media studies. In order to answer that question, it’s important to take a look at the data.
National polls by Pew Research Center show that from 1965 to 2016, the amount of time fathers reported spending on care for their children nearly tripled. These days, dads constitute 17% of all stay-at-home parents, up from 10% in 1989. Today, fathers are just as likely as mothers to say that being a parent is “extremely important to their identity.” They are also just as likely to describe parenting as rewarding.
Yet, there is evidence in the Pew data that these changes present challenges, as well. The majority of dads feel they do not spend enough time with their children, often citing work responsibilities as the primary reason. Only 39% of fathers feel they are doing “a very good job” raising their children.
Perhaps this sort of self-criticism is being reinforced by foolish and failing father portrayals in sitcom content.
Of course, not all sitcoms depict fathers as incompetent parents. The sample we examined stalled out in 2017, whereas TV Guide presented “7 Sitcom Dads Changing How we Think about Fatherhood Now” in 2019. In our study, the moments of problematic parenting often took place in a wider context of a generally quite loving depiction.
Still, while television portrayals will likely never match the range and complexity of fatherhood, sitcom writers can do better by dads by moving on from the increasingly outdated foolish father trope.
Professor of Communication, University of Massachusetts Amherst
This article originally appeared on The Conversation.
From Limiting Beliefs to Limitless Potential: How Mister Rogers and Barbie Inspired My Learning Design of a Multimedia Curriculum for Young Children
It was never my intention to pull a Mister Rogers.
Then again — was it?
As a children’s media researcher and learning designer, I’m keenly aware of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood’s pedagogical punch. In fact, I dedicate an entire class session to this show and its spin-off, Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood, in the course I teach on youth and media at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.
When media are crafted sensitively, designed to meet children where they’re at and loaded with meaningful lessons, then young children can demonstrate significant learning outcomes.
Maybe this was in the back of my head when my colleagues at the Center for Scholars & Storytellers and I accepted an important challenge…
Context
Barbie, a brand first-famous for inventing 11.5-inch fashion dolls, has evolved into a cultural icon, and after 60+ years, was still the number one toy property in the world in 2020. Over the years, Barbie has had over 200 careers, nine body types, 35 skin tones, and 94 hairstyles. The brand’s slogan proudly declares: You Can Be Anything.
So, when a team of NYU researchers published data suggesting that some young children can’t be anything, and implicated stereotypes as a major reason why, Barbie took notice. The research found that, by the age of 6, many children begin to embrace limiting beliefs, specifically:
Girls stop believing that they are as smart as boys
Boys stop believing that they are as kind as girls
Girls avoid demonstrating their leadership skills
Girls and boys doubt that girls can be anything
Internalizing these beliefs can lead children to marginalize themselves and others. And there goes everyone’s chance to be anything.
Barbie labeled the space between children’s limitless potential and their limiting beliefs “The Dream Gap.” And to help close it, Barbie funds partner organizations impacting girls directly, inspires girls through meaningful content, highlights inspirational women through their role models program, and now has commissioned a stereotype-defying curriculum.
That’s where we came in.
Barbie Dream Gap Curriculum — The Original
My colleagues and I designed the Barbie Dream Gap Curriculum by working backward. Our goal was to disrupt young children’s trajectories towards both stereotyping others by gender and denying themselves the opportunity to be their whole selves. Which “tools” would young children need in their “toolboxes” in order to get there?
First, we reasoned, they would need to feel empowered to authentically contribute. Lesson 1: Participation. Second, they would need to believe in their ability to learn and improve through effort. Lesson 2: Growth Mindset. Third, they would need to expect challenges and recover from setbacks. Lesson 3: Resilience. Fourth, they would need to celebrate their unique talents and interests. Lesson 4: Multiple Intelligences. Fifth, they would need to picture themselves in numerous and stereotype-defying occupations. Lesson 5: Careers. Sixth, they would need to step into their power. Lesson 6: Leadership.
To explicitly push back against harmful stereotypes, not only pertaining to gender but also to race/ethnicity, class, nationality, and ability, we incorporated the stories of diverse role models, including: Jovita Idár, Helen Keller, Junko Tabei, Fred Rogers, Maggie Lena Walker, and Annie Dodge Wauneka.
Our curriculum organically intersected with multiple social and emotional learning (SEL) goals. Research shows that universal, school-based SEL programs benefit K-12 students across a variety of measures in the short- and long-term. So, we aligned our curriculum to SEL standards.
We formatted the curriculum as a K-2 teacher-facing collection of lesson plans, worksheets, and newsletters, with an original, live-action video and a poster accompanying each lesson.
In our 2019 pilot in El Segundo, California, the curriculum demonstrated promising results. Independent evaluators conducted a classic experiment, collecting pre- and post-test data from intervention and control groups. Findings showed that the curriculum:
Expanded children’s interest in more careers
Increased all girls’ beliefs that anyone could be a good leader
Inspired more 2nd grade girls to identify females as “really really smart” and to say YES to the question, “Do you think you can be anything?”
To say I was excited would be putting it mildly. First, El Segundo. Next, the world!
Then a little something unexpected happened in 2020... Perhaps you can recall…
Barbie Dream Gap Curriculum — Take Two
Barbie challenged us to adapt the curriculum for online learning. In digital form, the lessons could reach remote and hybrid learners as well as support diverse educators.
We reimagined our curriculum as a video series featuring Community Club, an after-school club whose members yearn to help people and animals and fix things in their communities. Community Club meets online, via a video conferencing platform like Zoom -- and the students viewing the content just stumbled into its meeting. Welcome to Community Club! We split each lesson (aka, each Community Club meeting) across three videos, separated by two interactive opportunities where students could answer a question by clicking on an icon.
Channeling my inner Rogers, I played Dr. Rachel Klein, the club’s warm-and-fuzzy advisor. In that role, I facilitated many of the same activities as our original lesson plans. I also created three characters to populate Community Club’s membership:
Jada, an inquisitive, independent third-grader who identifies as a Chinese-American girl and manages anxiety;
Lulu, a thoughtful, methodical third-grader who identifies as a Black girl and as “quiet,” or introverted; and
Mateo, a gentle, collaborative third-grader who identifies as a Mexican-American boy and lives with hearing loss.
These characters were brought to life by bespoke hand and rod puppets, each operated by a puppeteer and separately voiced by an actor whose identity matched that of the character.
Educators and students nationwide piloted the curriculum this spring — thank you to participating schools in Boston, Chicago, and Austin! So far, we’ve gotten lots of positive feedback.
“I felt that the lesson was well thought out and kid friendly.”
“Loved the video with the student leader. It is so helpful for students to see the ideas in action. Also, really wonderful for them to see themselves reflected in the people in the video.”
“It was very beneficial how the puppets shared how they cope with differences, hearing loss and anxious thoughts.”
We will continue piloting the curriculum this summer — thank you to participating after-school organizations in South Carolina! — and in the fall. We look forward to combing through the data and discovering whether/how this multimedia experience serves children.
As to bridging The Dream Gap… Mr. Rogers once said, “There's a world of difference between insisting on someone's doing something and establishing an atmosphere in which that person can grow into wanting to do it.”
So, our work does not end at curriculum. Here’s to all of us, in our own unique ways, establishing an atmosphere, a society, a world that inspires everyone to want to unlock opportunity — so our kids can be anything.
Principal, Laurel Felt Consulting
Lecturer, USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism
Senior Fellow, Center for Scholars and Storytellers
P.S. This project was a labor of love for so many people!!! To quote Fred Rogers, “I hope you're proud of yourself for the times you've said "yes," when all it meant was extra work for you and was seemingly helpful only to someone else." I am beyond grateful and humbled by your brilliance.
THANK YOU:
Maggie Chieffo, Yalda T. Uhls, Hannah Demetor, Kathryn Lenihan, Kim Wilson, Colleen Russo Johnson, Josanne Buchanan, Rosie Molinary, Mary Faber, Benari Poulten, Hand to Mouth Creative, Jenn Guptill, Katie O’Brien, Jaz Nannini, Students of Spring 2021 COMM 457, Sarah Berman, Chris Patstone, Miles Taber, Karen Barazza, Jenny W. Chan, Whitney Watters, Adam Blau, Gaby Moreno, Deborah S. Craig, Rebecca Naomi Jones, Nir Liebenthal, Page Spencer, Caroline Fung, Annie Meyers, Zach Stuckelman, Sina Zakeri, Anita Narkhede, Arelyse Campos, Rebeca Ruiz, Tina Garoosi, Gillian Jewell, Jill Shinderman, Kat O’Brien, Corinne, Everett, Mike Colby, Sasha, Andrea Merfeld, Lexi, Randi Ralph, Molly, Annie, Cyndi Otteson, Quinn, Ellie Chadwick, Richie, Kimmi Berlin, Ari, Diomaris Safi, Mila, Miry Whitehill, Ruben, Rebecca Fox, Ruthie, Muriel, Gardenia Spiegel, Koa, Rachel Deano, Jada.
Don’t Just Listen! The Social Benefits of Active Music-Making for Children
I’m a professor, but I’m also a parent. So, the long months of the pandemic have found me spending every Thursday teaching nine children from Pre-K to 2nd grade in my home, with my spouse as my fearless co-teacher. We are both lifelong musicians – the guitar-toting, songwriting, traveling kind – and when we started our remote school co-op with four other families, we knew music would be a big part of our day. What we didn’t realize was that it would become so central to so many aspects of our teaching approach. We began by sourcing a handful of affordable ukuleles, adding a few extra tambourines to our bucket of percussion instruments, and off we went. At first, we scheduled dedicated music time around math and reading and science, but we quickly discovered that no subject was beyond the reach of our voices, our guitars, our bodies, and the children’s rapidly evolving rhyming capabilities! We have found ourselves co-creating silly songs about snails and trees, exploring the physics of sound using electric guitars and banjos, and practicing greetings in Spanish over two chords on the ukulele. Music has come to infuse almost everything we do with these kids, but here’s the key: they have to be actively making the music – not just listening. Singing, swaying, marching, making up words, beating a drum – these are all examples of what researchers call “active music-making.” And more and more research is confirming that using active music-making with young children in a group setting offers unique social benefits.
As a social scientist, I am interested in how making music with other people can help bring us together. A 2010 study conducted with preschool-age children showed that when kids participated in active music-making that involved singing and dancing together, they exhibited increased helping and cooperation with peers when compared to a group in a control condition without musical elements. I recently published a study extending this work to unfamiliar adults; preschool-age children who participated in a singing and movement activity were more helpful and willing to share with a new adult than children in a non-musical condition. Why would that be? Well, the children in the musical condition in our study spent more of their time looking at their partners. They also made more attempts to move together, and moving together in synchrony has been shown to increase sharing and cooperation in preschool-age children. Dr. Miriam Lense and Dr. Stephen Camarata from Vanderbilt University have proposed that active music-making offers a convergence of qualities that make it ideal for encouraging social interaction. It requires shared attention between participants, it is predictable, and it is easily and naturally integrated into play for many young children. Because it is fun for most kids, it is also naturally reinforcing. Dr. Lense and I recently collaborated on a study showing preliminary results of a parent-child music class involving children with and without Autism Spectrum Disorder, and many participating parents emphasized that making music with their child over the course of the program strengthened their parent-child bond outside of the class. A picture begins to emerge: actively engaging with music through singing and movement connects us to one another.
So, the question becomes, how can we – as a community of scholars and storytellers creating content for preschool and elementary school children – make use of this information in meaningful ways? First, preschool and early elementary content with musical elements should be intentional about eliciting active musical engagement from children during and after viewing. One way to do this is to build on familiar and accessible melodies and rhythms; Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood has done this brilliantly, recycling melodies while tying lyrics to everyday contexts in which children can sing the tunes themselves. Research suggests that engaging deeply with music requires children to allocate their limited attention and processing ability to unfamiliar elements; thus, using familiar tunes and varying only the lyrics is a worthy approach if lyrical content is significant. Interactive apps with embedded recording features like OK Play offer a great blueprint for eliciting joint music-making from parents and children. Content creators can also incorporate opportunities for musical improvisation, a special category of active music-making. Children’s efforts at musical improvisation may sound messy to skilled adult musicians, but emerging work shows that musical improvisation may help consolidate memory following a learning activity. The take-home message is that even though active music-making may look like pure entertainment, there is measurable benefit to kids and families singing and moving together.
Actionable Insights
Don’t underestimate the value of musical segments in preschool and elementary children’s media! Musical bits that are memorable and relevant to children’s lives can be important building blocks for social interaction outside of viewing time.
When creating musical segments, consider using melodies repeatedly and pairing with new lyrical content, particularly if the lyrical content is intended to teach something.
Consider ways to elicit active musical engagement from the viewer both during and after viewing. Gross motor movements that are easy to follow – or even sign language elements – can engage children physically with the music-making experience.
Sara Beck, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Psychology at Randolph College
Collaborator of The Center for Scholars and Storytellers
Additional References:
Mining 21st-Century Skills at Home with Technology
This article is part of our #LearningAtHome2020 series with the Child & Family Blog and BOLD
Just one year ago, the phrase “learning at home” may have conjured different images for parents and educators, unless home-schooling was already the norm. Families the world over have experienced disruptions to daily life and the challenges of distance learning brought on by the pandemic. Teachers with a reluctance for technology in the classroom have had to make an abrupt shift to reach their students. Parents who have chosen to limit their children’s time with digital devices have been challenged by the inevitable increase in screen time as education went virtual. The line between work and home life has blurred, just as the line between screen time and simply, time, is ever-blurring.
I’m sure your family could use a break from the math or literacy talk, so I’m going to give you some ideas on how you can encourage your children’s development of 21st-century skills such as critical thinking, communication, and creativity through digital play. This is not nearly as daunting a task as it seems. After all, parents and caregivers are children’s first educators and the home environment is their first classroom. Children learn, develop, and make sense of their world through play. But just as screen time and “time” are increasingly intertwined, our use of digital media as tools for learning needs to evolve. We need to literally think outside the TV or touchscreen box and not be constrained by it.
An example of a playful, open-ended digital world is the video game, Minecraft. In Minecraft, the sky is the limit--within this world, players are bound by their own imaginations. For this reason, Minecraft presents many opportunities to foster a number of 21st-century skills.
The 4 Cs: Communication, Collaboration, Creativity, and Critical Thinking
Video games abound with opportunities for social connection and collaboration. Collaboration involves two or more people in a shared effort to learn or solve a problem together. Susan Danby and colleagues provided detailed accounts of children helping each other succeed in various digital environments, and in various regions of the world (Norway, Sweden, and Australia). They provided an example of Australian siblings, ages 4 and 7 years old, traversing a shared digital world (Minecraft) as they acquired resources and combatted zombies. Even though the two children were on their own devices, they engaged in play that demonstrated communication patterns indicative of collaboration and instruction. Children who play games together learn perspective-taking and must consider each others’ shared knowledge.
While the potential to learn and develop 21st-century skills in massive multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG) such as Minecraft exists, transferring these skills to the real-world is less straightforward. When I was the lab manager at the Swinburne Babylab in Australia, I remember entertaining a sibling of one of our research participants. I say “entertaining,” but in reality, I provided him with scrap paper and colored pencils and his imagination took care of the rest. I was so impressed as he explained that he was drawing and planning a building that he would later construct in Minecraft. This is just one example of how the digital world and the physical world can connect to encourage the transfer of skills, such as creativity.
In addition to creativity, researchers have also found that playing Minecraft encourages critical thinking and problem-solving; students who used Minecraft to accomplish various tasks commented on how the game-design forced them to think outside the box. This innovative and creative approach to problem-solving was also shown in a group of 13 year-olds who completed an 8-week workshop in which they were asked to create and explain their products in Minecraft. After the workshop, students’ scores on a test of creativity improved, and their teacher also observed improvements in the students’ creativity. Not only does Minecraft enable the user to have creative freedom, but it can also encourage players to seek information from outside resources, such as reading content on forums or watching or creating Youtube tutorials, etc. This multimodal literacy is referred to as metagaming.
Actionable Insights
Content creators can provide learning opportunities for children by:
Creating open-ended environments that lack an explicit goal, “freedom of play”
Providing opportunities to help characters. Prosocial content promotes prosocial behaviors such as helping and empathy.
Having more tools to choose from to encourage greater creativity in problem-solving.
Providing opportunities to interact with and explore the environment.
Encouraging replayability by making sure the game experience isn’t linear or the same every time.
Content creators can help parents create learning opportunities for their children by:
Providing a curriculum with suggestions on how to take the digital content to the real world and practice specific skills, depending on the goal.
e.g., plan a garden in Minecraft and then plant a real garden
Recognizing that the digital world extends beyond its intended medium, and children can create educational videos for others to improve their gameplay or participate in online forums to share ideas.
Happy playing!
Brittany Huber, PhD
Collaborator of the Center for Scholars & Storytellers
Supporting Parents with Children’s Distance Learning
This article is part of our #LearningAtHome2020 series with the Child & Family Blog and BOLD
If you’re a parent of a school-aged child - or know a parent - you know about the anxieties and challenges around children’s distance-learning. Earlier this year when many states shut down schools for in-person learning, teachers and parents scrambled to support kids in making the quick transition. Parents’ and caregivers’ roles shifted overnight, requiring them to be co-teachers and co-learners as they tried to support kids with distance learning. And this is just the parents who are able to stay home with kids. Many parents had to go to their job sites and leave their kids to fend for themselves. Months later, it is clear that distance learning is not going away. Many schools will transition back to hybrid learning, which means some will be in-person and some at-home. There have been, and will also likely be, more outbreaks that cause some re-opened schools to shut down again.
In March, Common Sense Media launched Wide Open School to support parents with distance learning. This new service curates the best-of-the-best free learning activities for kids and resources for families that make at-home learning easier through user-friendly daily schedules, activities to support children’s social and emotional well-being, digital citizenship, and materials that address learning and thinking differences.
So based on what parents and children are experiencing right now at this moment in time, what should children’s media creators do to support families? Consider the following tips on supporting parents with their children’s learning.
Address Character Education
Character Education and social-emotional learning (SEL) is in great need (and great demand) both by parents and schools. SEL content is some of our top-requested content on Wide Open School. With the combination of the coronavirus pandemic, economic downturn, civil unrest, police violence, and school closures, there are extreme pressures on the mental health of kids and families. Including characters, stories, and learning that develop characteristics for children such as community, perseverance, humility, empathy, and self-control helps build strong, resilient children. See Common Sense Media’s article Building Character Strengths with Quality Media and our report Tweens, Teens, Tech, and Mental Health for support in thinking about these issues.
Model caregivers and children learning together
Some parents may have rarely supported their children’s schoolwork. They may lack role models to show them how to be a co-teacher and co-learner with their child, or how to be a collaborator with their child’s teacher. Content producers can illustrate and normalize life-long learning as an ongoing and cross-generational practice, in which caregivers, older siblings, and children are learning together and supporting one another. Whether it’s providing advice or showing a parent sitting with a child engaging in their distance learning, or tips for parents such as the importance of having children follow their distance learning schedule, parents need to see examples of what their role could be. Moreover, parents are searching for high-quality educational content to supplement their child’s at-home learning. Suggesting exceptional, research-based apps, websites, and games for parents to use in conjunction with their child’s school learning will provide much-needed help.
Encourage media balance
Screen use has been increasing over the years, even before the pandemic hit. On average, daily screen/device use at home is about three hours for two through eight-year-olds, 5 hours for tweens, and 7 hours for teens (Common Sense Media, 2017, 2019). These amounts have increased due to the addition of distance learning time. Heavy media use is associated with physical and mental health problems. Though we know that not all screen time is created equal, we need to encourage media balance, which means balancing media use with other meaningful activities in everyday life. For example, in schools, Go Noodle is so popular, especially for 5-13-year-olds, because it gets kids up and out of their chairs and moving their bodies. Getting the body moving and taking tech breaks helps reduce stress and improves focus and mental clarity. Content creators might want to consider building these kinds of intermissions into their programming.
Foster digital citizenship
The importance of digital citizenship - thinking critically and participating responsibly online - has come to the forefront, especially as kids do distance learning. Parents are looking for guidance to help their kids make good choices about protecting their online privacy, being kind and civil communicators, and thinking critically about the things they see online (discerning misinformation). Companies such as Disney have run campaigns to address digital citizenship issues, including cyberbullying. But beyond social awareness campaigns, kids need to see examples of ways they could handle “digital dilemmas” that come up in their lives such as: What do I do if I see someone say something mean or hurtful online? What should I consider before sharing a photo or video? How can I tell if something I see online is true or not? Successful digital learning - both at school and at home - starts with digital citizenship.
Actionable Insights
Children’s media producers can serve the present needs of caregivers and children by:
Creating content that addresses character education and supports social-emotional learning.
Providing models for how children and their caregivers can best interact with one another and educators while engaging in at-home learning.
Encouraging children to take breaks from screen time in favor of physical and screen-free activities.
Fostering digital citizenship so kids behave safely and participate responsibly online.
Kelly Mendoza, PhD
Senior Director of Education Programs, Common Sense Education
Collaborator of the Center for Scholars & Storytellers
School Closures, Stay-At-Home Orders, and Screen Time
The Importance of Educational Television Programs to Children’s Learning During the COVID-19 Pandemic
We’ve all been there…whether it’s with your own child, a younger sibling, or the kid you are babysitting, we have sighed in exasperation while handing over our cell phones or turning on the TV so we can do our daily tasks without distractions. Turning to media as a form of a modern day “babysitter” is all too common when caregivers are in a pinch and need a last resort to keep kids busy and happy. Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, more parents and siblings are working from home while their young children attempt remote schooling and look for ways to fend off the boredom of quarantine.
Unsurprisingly, there has been a substantial increase in total TV usage in the US since the beginning of the pandemic, with daytime TV viewing for kids (ages 6 to 11) and teens (ages 12-17) both increasing around 300% on average. Throughout COVID, kids have been using media as their primary source of entertainment, information, social connection, and education. Young children and teens say their use of media is mostly due to boredom and other options being inaccessible to them. This is especially true of TV consumption, particularly for preschoolers who have less autonomy in manipulating technology but can passively sit in front of a television screen. As quarantine has stretched on, the attitudes of parents about limiting screen time, social media usage, and engagement with online entertainment in general have eased considerably, with many entirely giving up on trying to regulate their children’s media habits. How many hours a day your child is watching TV is less of a concern when you are trying to work from home and juggle the demands on your attention around the household. Now, with young children spending more time on screens during the day than ever before, it is the responsibility of adults and content creators to ensure that the programming available to children is approached with an understanding that the content is central to life as a kid during the pandemic.
Another area of a typical child’s daily life that has been drastically altered by the coronavirus is education and schooling. School closures and the rapid shift to remote learning have created gaps in access to social and educational resources, rendering many children vulnerable and struggling at home. Numerous K-12 schools and school districts, for example the Los Angeles United School District, have recently announced plans to remain closed for in-person instruction until January 2021. Educators have projected that students who remain enrolled in school this fall without in-person instruction will lose 3-4 months of learning, even with access to an average quality of remote instruction. The outlook is bleaker for those with connection to low-quality remote instruction or even none at all. As a result, glaring inconsistencies in educational availability and quality, both with regard to resources of schools and in the home, have made the gross inequities in the US education system difficult to ignore. With this in mind, what steps can be taken to facilitate the continued learning and development of children and teens during quarantine?
Here is the basis of what we know so far: (1) school-aged children are spending significantly more time watching daytime TV and (2) many children will not have access to in-person schooling this fall, which will result in unequal and exacerbated learning gaps. So, what if stations started broadcasting high quality educational media content created for children of specific age groups more frequently during the day while parents are busy working? Would this make the increased time children are spending watching TV during the pandemic worthwhile, by simultaneously increasing their opportunities for learning? As it turns out, the answer is yes!
Media technologies have positive effects on the social and cognitive abilities of children, provided that media content is developmentally appropriate and emphasizes active engagement. For example, engagement with PBS educational media content resulted in academic improvements across the disciplines, including English language arts, mathematics, and science. Additionally, popular educational programs such as Sesame Street and Blue’s Clues have been shown to improve academic achievement and school readiness of children. These educational TV shows designed around a narrative curriculum are successful in teaching children intended lessons about both cognitive and social skills. Storytelling is a crucial medium for children to keep learning through the pandemic, but it is the nature of the content that they are watching which determines which, if any, educational gains they are making.
The opportunity for learning through educational media is not limited to academic lessons, but also applies to the development of social skills. This provides a promising avenue to teach children about new norms and expectations during the COVID outbreak, such as wearing a mask in public and using hand sanitizer. Another feature of educational media that is well suited to the pandemic, is that it has been found to be most effective when it encourages children to be active rather than passive viewers, creating a connection between on- and off-screen activities. This connection could be established through supplemental activities inspired by the narrative of the media content, such as completing a hands-on, creative project or by encouraging outdoor exploration after watching an episode. Such activities and active engagement with media in general are not only beneficial to children’s academic learning through educational media, but also to the facilitation of enriching off-screen activities that can be done in the home during the current period of quarantine.
Actionable Insights
Here are some actionable insights for children’s content creators during the COVID-19 pandemic to keep kids who are unable to attend in-person classes learning by capitalizing on the large increase of TV viewing among children during quarantine:
Keep in mind that school-aged children are spending upwards of 3 times the amount of hours watching TV since the pandemic. Developmentally appropriate television content is even more important now that kids are spending more time at home in front of screens.
Don’t rely on parents to monitor and regulate children’s media habits during the pandemic. Ensure that the options available to them are high quality and support active engagement from the viewer.
Educational programming is successful in teaching viewers intended lessons, both related to cognitive and social gains. This suggests that new norms and conventions surrounding COVID-19 can be effectively taught to children through television content. Focus on incorporating simple language and easily understood examples when featuring the pandemic in storylines. Click here for our child-friendly COVID-19 Lexicon.
Children who watch educational television programs have greater academic success and higher levels of school readiness than those who do not. Therefore, incorporate educational content into narratives to keep kids learning during school shutdowns. This has the potential to help combat learning loss associated with remote instruction.
Educational programming should engage children with both the world on-screen and off-screen. Create opportunities for children to connect the narrative they are watching on-screen with the world they are living in.
Emily Raich
CSS Intern
How the Pandemic Can Teach Kids About Compassion
What if this crisis became an opportunity for children to deepen their sense of care?
As a homebound parent with a preschooler, I’ve felt an array of emotions over the past few months during the coronavirus pandemic. I’ve felt sadness and worry about how many people are becoming ill, while being confounded by trying to juggle homeschooling and my own work responsibilities.
But I’ve also felt a great deal of gratitude for the kindnesses that have punctuated so many of my days lately, like when a neighbor left herbs from her garden at my gate or when a faraway friend whom I haven’t heard from in years sent text messages of love.
These positive experiences have affirmed to me that when times are difficult, our common human response is not to show reckless disregard of others but to show compassion.
We often assume that emergencies automatically lead to panic, but research consistently shows that people tend to act in solidarity and turn toward each other with a sense of togetherness. They volunteer, donate supplies, and spread goodwill, strengthening social bonds and helping everyone be resilient together.
“Affiliative, supportive, prosocial behaviors are more common, where widespread sickness and debility evoke acts of mutual aid among members of a community in crisis,” explains Steven Taylor, professor and clinical psychologist at the University of British Columbia, in his book The Psychology of Pandemics.
Compassion—noticing others suffering and being motivated to provide relief to them—grows early on in life. Five-month-old babies prefer helpers over hinderers. When babies between eight and 10 months old see people bump their knees or hurt their fingers, they already show the seeds of empathy with facial expressions, vocalizations, and gestures that reflect concern and a desire to understand others’ distress. By 14 months old, toddlers help others by handing them objects out of reach.
How can parents help their children realize their instinctual capacity for compassion during the coronavirus pandemic? Scientists have suggested three ways that children develop compassion that are relevant to these times.
1. Show compassion to kids so they experience receiving it
During the pandemic, many of our children are feeling uncertainty and upheaval, just like us parents. They miss school, their friends, and playing sports like they did before. For young children who don’t have the breadth of words to express their worries and fears, or older children who don’t have the emotional agility to get through tough moments, it can be overwhelming.
As a result, our kids may be irritable or have more meltdowns and tantrums than usual. But rather than seeing children as uncooperative, parents can consider whether their behavior is simply an indication that they might be suffering, too.
If we offer children warmth and tenderness when their routines are turned upside down, we can soothe them in their own time of need. Parents can extend compassion by making space to help their children become better aware of and process their feelings. Acknowledging and being sensitive to our children’s emotions can act as a salve and help them to see that this moment of hardship will eventually pass.
Parents can also frequently talk to their children about all the members of their extended family and broader community who have cared for them both recently and in the past. For example, parents can tell and retell their children stories of neighbors who brought gift baskets after their pet died or dropped off dinners when a grandparent was in the hospital. These conversations serve to remind children that they are connected to a network of people who are a generous source of compassion from which they can draw strength during times of suffering.
Receiving compassion offers kids a firsthand experience of what it feels like.
2. Teach kids to practice self-compassion
In turn, just as children receive compassion from parents, they can also learn to offer it to themselves.
When children are having a hard time during the pandemic, parents can encourage them to listen and respond to their bodies and minds with greater awareness, acceptance, and kindness. For example, parents of older children can teach them to take self-compassion breaks to handle stressful moments.
For younger children, this might mean guiding them to first pause and notice their tense muscles, rapid heartbeats, and racing thoughts. Ask them to recognize that they’re having a moment of hardship and children all over the world are having these kinds of moments, too. Teach them to breathe deeply from their bellies and offer themselves words of tenderness like “May I feel calm.”
Parents can also encourage their younger children to cultivate self-compassion by planning enjoyable activities to look forward to after a hard day of homeschooling or after realizing summer vacation plans are cancelled.
Self-compassion allows children to process and cope with difficult emotions. Eventually, it can help them see their common humanity—that everyone suffers sometimes—and know that it’s all right to feel bad.
Tending to their intense emotions helps children be restored and renewed, which in turn prepares them to serve others. Overwhelming personal distress can make children singularly self-focused and less able to attend to others’ suffering. Self-compassion practices can help them be more able to orient toward others and extend compassion to them—which is the last step.
3. Encourage kids to extend compassion to others
During the coronavirus pandemic, even though children are inclined to help, it can be hard for them to know exactly what they can do.
Children can start with small acts of compassion as a family—sending kind thoughts to essential workers, regularly FaceTiming with isolated older or immunocompromised family members, or helping gather canned goods for the local food bank. Parents can also review these other ideas from Youth Service America to help inspire children toward compassionate acts.
Research suggests that small differences in language matter when we’re encouraging our kids to help. Parents can nurture young children’s motivation by inviting them to “be a helper,” which can instill in them a compassionate self-identity. But there’s a catch: When tasks are too difficult and children experience a setback, those who were asked to “be a helper” are less likely to try to help again compared to children who were simply asked “to help.” So, in circumstances when children might not succeed at helping with something, it’s better to just ask them “to help.”
Even young children have undoubtedly picked up on their radar that life right now is quite a bit different than it used to be. What if this pandemic became an opportunity for them to learn that being human during hard times involves transformation and resilience, and that compassion helps us all to thrive?
Maryam Abdullah, Ph.D.
This article originally appeared on Greater Good, the online magazine of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley.
Five Ways to Reduce Racial Bias in Your Children
How do we combat racial prejudice? New research reveals how parents influence the formation of bias in children.
Children notice difference across racial lines. Even from a very young age, babies scan a face differently if it belongs to someone of a different race, suggesting that racial bias may be hardwired.
But noticing difference is not the same as having negative or positive beliefs around difference. Those types of judgments develop over time and are influenced by many things, including the social climate children grow up in and the experiences they have that confirm or disprove their biases.
This is where parenting comes in. Though it’s clear that parents are not solely responsible for biasing their kids one way or the other, science suggests that they do play a role—and an important one. In fact, their influence may extend well beyond a child’s early years and into adolescence.
Though how this works is not totally clear, recent research has shown that the process starts early and involves both explicit (deliberate) and implicit (unconscious) messages that parents send to their children. This is the good news: Parents can be a positive force in combating prejudice in their children. But the “bad news” is that kids can easily pick up prejudice from society at large unless parents do something about it.
Here are some of the ways that parents can help reduce negative bias in their children.
1. Expose kids to more positive images of other racial groups
Kids are immersed in negative stereotypes perpetuated by the media and culture, just as adults are. To counteract that, parents can expose kids through stories, books, and films to more positive, counter-stereotypical images of people from different racial and ethnic groups—including moral exemplars like Martin Luther King Jr. or Dolores Huerta. In studies with adults, this type of intervention has been shown over and over to be one of the most effective ways of decreasing bias.
Though less is known about how this might impact children specifically, at least one study suggests that they benefit, too. Researchers presented white and Asian children ages 5-12 with four positive vignettes involving admirable black people (such as firefighters or doctors), admirable white people, or flowers and then measured the kids’ implicit biases towards black people. Being exposed to the positive vignettes significantly reduced implicit bias in children nine years of age and older—though not in the younger children.
According to lead author Antonya Gonzalez, this study suggests that showing older kids positive images of black people may counteract negative stereotypes in society.
“Hearing these stories, the kids are internalizing an association between the group they’re hearing about and positivity, and that counteracts the stereotypical associations that they may already have,” she says.
However, just because younger children were not moved by the stories in her experiment doesn’t mean we shouldn’t expose younger kids to positive images, as well, Gonzalez believes.
“If there were more exposure and more exemplars, there’s a chance that might be enough to change associations” in younger kids, too, she says.
2. Help your kids develop cross-group friendships
Research suggests that cross-race friendships are an important factor in decreasing prejudice, probably because they help decrease stress and fears of rejection that may occur in cross-group situations. Having a friend from another group may also remove barriers to empathy and caring, which in turn decreases prejudice.
Research shows that having contact with different racial or social groups—especially when that contact is warm and positive—helps to decrease prejudice and to encourage more cross-group friendships. In a study with school kids of various ages, students who had higher levels of cross-race contact—including cross-race friendships—were more likely to see the way race plays a role in social exclusion and to view that behavior negatively.
In a longitudinal study with adolescents, those who had cross-group friendships were less likely to develop biases against immigrants in their community, even if their parents or peers were biased. These studies suggest that cross-group friendships might help mitigate biases that could otherwise form.
In one study, German teens who established a cross-group friendship during a three-year period demonstrated lower prejudice toward immigrants at the end of the study than those who hadn’t. In addition, the teens were more likely to develop cross-group friendships when there were more kids from different groups and more positive social norms concerning cross-group friendships in their community. This suggests that opportunity—meaning, living in diverse neighborhoods or going to integrated schools—is important.
Psychologist Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton encourages parents to take an active role in supporting cross-race friendships in their kids by organizing play-dates, inviting kids over to their houses, offering rides to sporting events, and creating other opportunities for their kids’ cross-group friendships to form.
“The default is to do these things with people with whom you already have an affinity,” he says. “You need to help scaffold these social experiences for your kids and be more intentional if you want to be sure that cross-group friendships happen.”
3. Cultivate cross-group friendships yourself
Parents can help normalize cross-group friendships by role-modeling them for their kids. This may seem superfluous, but research has shown that children’s racial attitudes are less tied to parents’ explicit messages around race than to the racial makeup of the parents’ social network.
Why does having cross-race friendships have such a strong impact on bias? Mendoza-Denton says that when you develop a cross-race friendship, you incorporate your friend’s struggles, motivations, and thoughts into your own self-concept—not in a way that’s confusing, but more expansive. For example, he says, you start to feel what they feel and empathize with them: maybe sweating when they give a talk or suffering when they experience heartbreak. And that experience of “inclusion of the other in the self” decreases bias against that person’s social group.
“It’s so much more organic to reduce bias by developing intergroup friendships, because it changes your attitudes through a very human mechanism, which is the interpersonal,” says Mendoza-Denton.
Though adding people to your social group based simply on race is probably unwise, it’s possible to search for common interests with people of different backgrounds, making it more likely that a friendship will happen naturally. Once friendship grows, empathy develops organically, says Mendoza-Denton.
4. Talk explicitly about race and the effects of racism
Many black parents give explicit instructions to their kids about the importance of race in society and what they can do to mitigate any bias they encounter. But well-meaning white parents are less likely to bring up race with their children, perhaps fearing that doing so would mean they don’t value egalitarianism or believe in a “post-race” society. The problem with that approach is that not talking about race can create a vacuum of information, which leads children to absorb biases around them—often in ways that are counter to parents’ own held values.
In one study, researchers had white parents read books depicting racial issues to their preschool-aged children (under the guise of studying the effects of literature on learning) while being videotaped. Racial attitudes were measured and compared afterwards in both parents and their children.
Later analyses of the videos showed that many parents avoided mention of race—even if their children asked about it—and used “colorblind” approaches to the issues raised in the book. For example, they might say, “It’s important to be nice to everyone” rather than something about race. Though the parents assumed their kids would absorb their colorblind ideals and hold favorable views of African-Americans, the children’s views weren’t in line with these expectations, suggesting that a colorblind approach does not decrease biased attitudes in kids.
In fact, research suggests that parents need to be much more explicit about racism and its effects. When white parents were asked to have race-related discussions with their kids—either with or without watching educational videos about race—their children showed more favorable attitudes toward racial outgroup members only if their parents discussed race directly. Interestingly, though, the researchers had trouble getting the parents to have these discussions—even when instructed to do so as part of the study. Apparently, there are psychological barriers to discussing race among many Caucasian parents.
How can parents overcome these? It’s not easy, says Mendoza-Denton, because if you aren’t comfortable, you will avoid the topic. He suggests that parents need to increase their own comfort first by developing connections to people from other racial groups. That will make it easier for parents to have these conversations without resorting to fear and avoidance.
If you can overcome your own discomfort, there are many children’s books that expose kids to the values and experiences of different groups and could be conversation starters. Or you may want to follow Allison Briscoe-Smith’s advice on how to use the movie Zootopia to talk to your children about racial prejudice.
5. Work to combat biases in yourself
Research clearly shows that the impact of parent bias on kids shouldn’t be underestimated. Although explicit biases have negative effects on kids, implicit bias can also impact children.
In one study, researchers found that very young children exhibited more explicit negative bias if their mothers held implicit biases—regardless of their explicit messaging. There can be a mismatch between what parents say and their unconscious reactions toward minority groups—and children seem to pick up on this.
Though implicit biases may seem an impossible thing to control—after all, they are supposed to be unconscious—they are quite changeable with conscious effort. Research suggests that automatic biases can be countered by deliberate attempts to counter them, exposure to moral exemplars, or positive cross-race interactions. In other words, much of what influences children may also influence you.
Becoming more aware of subtle prejudices may be the first step, and you can always take an implicit bias test if you want to learn about yourself. But Mendoza-Denton believes that this information is most useful in parents who are truly willing to attend to their biases; otherwise, learning about their implicit biases could possibly backfire, making them feel exposed and defensive and increasing their avoidance of the issue.
In addition to developing cross-race friendships, he advises parents to read books, watch films, and consume media not aimed at them. For example, to understand the viewpoints and experiences of blacks, a white parent might read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book Between the World and Me, or see the movie I Am Not Your Negro. Doing so may counter bias by enriching understanding of another’s point of view, especially if they are motivated to foster that understanding.
Parents may think that there is very little they can do to influence their children’s biases or feel that prejudice-reduction is a daunting task. But if we are to impact bias in the long-term, we must come to grips with how bias is transmitted early in life and fed by a system of segregation and negative societal views. Parents, it turns out, can make an important contribution.
Jill Suttie, Psy.D
This article originally appeared on Greater Good, the online magazine of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley.
Foster or Otherwise, Parenting is Parenting: Love, care, and try your best
Media content has the power to shape perceptions and views on a mass scale. Unfortunately, media portrayals of youth in foster care are often negative and perpetuate unhelpful stereotypes. In this special blog series, The Center for Scholars and Storytellers is exploring this topic from multiple perspectives to inform and inspire the creation of accurate, empowering, and socially responsible media portrayals of foster care.
Marianne Guilfoyle, Chief Innovations Officer at LA-based Allies for Every Child and a key foster care advisor to the Center for Scholars and Storytellers, often remarks: “If I had a nickel for every person who said they had considered being foster parents…” And she is right. It’s not that people haven’t considered fostering, it’s that they’ve never seriously considered it. And far too often, their reason is that they don’t think they could do it. Indeed, multi-racial, same-sex couple Ching-chu Hu and Jim Van-Reeth, who have adopted four children through the foster care system, say they constantly hear comments such as “Oh, I could never do that” or “You’re stronger than me!” Their thoughts on this? “We believe most people on the planet naturally have the necessary tools to be foster parents -- to love and nurture a child.” Positive media portrayal of fostering can play a large role in empowering people to see that they can indeed foster. We need to see more of these stories.
Another honest response they get from people interested in adoption are fears that adopting from the system is too “dangerous”, and international adoption will get you “safer” children with “less issues.” To this, Hu and Van-Reeth remark; “Children are amazingly resilient, and the issues we all face as parents are strikingly similar, whether a child is from the foster care system, international adoption, or is a biological child. The primary difference is that we came into it expecting challenges, whereas those with biological children may be caught off guard by difficulties if they arise.” Rich Valenza, founder of Raise a Child and himself a father of two children he adopted through the foster care system, echoed this sentiment, reflecting on how the conversations with other parents at school drop-off were often quite therapeutic. He noticed, “Whether raising your birth children or children through foster care, the parenting problems you face are pretty similar! You have expectations of what raising a child will be like, but the reality quickly sinks in for both scenarios that it’s often not the way you planned. You’ll never be fully prepared. You likely won’t hear “thank you for giving me an amazing life” from your foster children as you tuck them into bed, but it’s a safe bet that you won’t hear that from your birth children either.” Content creators should strive to show the parenting commonalities in raising children, from the struggles to the joys, regardless of how their children entered their lives.
But this is not to dismiss the trauma that foster children experience in leaving their home, and whatever difficult life they may have endured previous to entering foster care (or within foster care). And this needs to be appropriately reflected in media, too. Valenza is a proud proponent of family therapy and removing all associated stigma, “Whether you have birth or foster children, all families can benefit from therapy-- it needs to be seen as a bonus to your life, an education into yourself.” In addition to recruiting foster parents, Raise a Child makes an effort to continually support parents throughout the foster/adoption process. They are currently partnered with LA-based Allies for Every Child on a pilot program that provides extra support and training to remind parents, for instance, that when problems arise, “this is not about me, this is about the needs of the child.” Portraying counseling as normative in fictional media could go a long way in reducing the stigma of seeking professional help, both for parents and children.
One of the biggest lessons that Hu and Van-Reeth encountered over the years was learning, accepting, and supporting the perspectives of the foster children’s previous lives, and not judging the biological parents (who often grew up in similar situations). They explain, “No matter how horrific we may find their previous life, it was still their home, their reality, their “comfortable” environment. It is the lives they were used to, and anything different, no matter how safe, how loving, how supportive, is still different, unusual, and unfamiliar to their world. And it takes a lot of time and nurturing for them to trust a safe and loving environment.”
Worrying that a foster child you hope to adopt might be reunified with their birth family is another fear that can lead people to pursue private or international adoption instead. Indeed, Hu and Van-Reeth went through this in the most heart-wrenching way; “Losing our 18 month old son-who we had had since day one- to his birth parents who we knew were falling back into drugs, was the hardest moment in our fostering journey. Especially the fact that as foster parents we felt we had no voice, no “seat” at the judicial table. Those scars left indelible memories.” Ultimately, their son did end up returning back to their home, and is now adopted by the Hu and Van-Reeth. Those interested in fostering and adoption and those creating media about foster care should understand that there are different paths to take, depending on the long-term option desired, and the amount of potential heartbreak you are willing to risk. Media content can help by portraying all types of fostering, including:
A foster parent that just fosters with no intention of adopting (roles which are very much needed since reunification with the birth family is the primary goal for children entering into the foster care system.)
A foster/adoptive parent who takes in foster children who might become available for adoption (and therefore would adopt the child if it was a good fit), but the child could instead be reunified with their birth family.
An adoptive-only parent who will only take a child into their home if they are already classified as “adoptive,” meaning the birth parents have terminated their parental rights.
Finally, another reason people are hesitant to become foster parents is because they’re afraid they won’t be good enough, or they will mess up as a parent. But ultimately, as Velenza correctly puts it, “Worrying about being good enough parent is exactly what will make someone a good foster parent. This shows that they are conscious of their role, and it shows they care. And ultimately, that is what it takes.”
For foster parents, there are countless instances along the way that remind you you’re doing a great job. For Valenza, as his children get older he finds he gets immeasurable pride from seeing them thrive, and even beginning to realize and appreciate the work he does for the foster care community. As Hu and Van-Reeth reflect; “It’s the small things: it’s seeing them come out of their shells, adjusting, being nurtured, opening up, and giving a hug. It’s seeing them bring their defenses down, grow, and become stronger and more comfortable with the world around them. It’s giving them first-time experiences, whether that’s flying on a plane, going to a park, or even, shockingly, giving them breakfast.”
Actionable Insights
Write and cast realistic, everyday people as foster parents who aren’t perfect people, but care and are doing their best.
- Media that gets it right: Instant Family - the couple is refreshingly honest in their uncertainty and process to fostering, making them extremely relatable.
Show the similar joys and struggles that parents face, regardless of whether their children are biological, adopted internationally/privately, or from the foster care system.
Normalize seeking counseling and therapy, show how it is beneficial and healthy for the entire family.
Colleen Russo Johnson, PhD
Senior Fellow of the Center for Scholars & Storytellers
This blog series is supported in part by the UCLA Pritzker Center for Strengthening Children and Families.
The Fun of Empowering Girls
For over 20 years, I worked in public broadcasting making shows for young people. We made television and digital content and even hosted events in communities across the country. As a public broadcaster, I was keenly aware of what we needed to work hard on, particularly gender stereotypes and gender roles — and, less overt gender bias — in Hollywood movies and TV. We needed to empower children — especially girls. We knew from research that if girls saw positive girl characters and women characters in television and film, it could have an incredible impact. But no matter how hard we worked, we couldn’t control what happened after they saw a program. We knew that the impact would be higher if the ideas in the shows were talked about at home. And even higher if a parent watched with them.
As a parent, I want great role models too. Like most parents, I feel a lot of pressure to try to make all the right choices. We’re fighting gender stereotypes in the media and gender bias in the culture. It can be a lot. So, I think it’s time to make a switch and take the pressure off.
I say let’s have fun empowering the girls (and boys!) in our lives. Instead of trying to find all the right everything to introduce them to, let’s make it an adventure together.
With your own kids, try to think outside of the box to find amazing female characters in your own movie and TV watching — and women and girls in your own neighbourhood or town, too! Make it a quest. A Mission. Make a chart. Or just do it for fun. Find what works with your family dynamic but make the goal finding awesome women near where you live. Here are some suggestions:
Make it a challenge to see who can find the coolest girl character in a TV show. And then watch it together. Why is she cool? How does she conform to gender roles?
Go to the library and see if any women authors are speaking. Or reading from their picture or chapter books.
Check out cool women running for office where you live and go and hear them speak. Even if your kids are too young to understand the issues, all the clapping and sign waiving will make it fun. A great way to combat gender bias is to see women being supported by other women and men.
In your play- whether it’s with stuffed animals, dolls or action characters- make the role-playing about inventing or leading (hey let’s find a way to invent a colour changing t-shirt or create a cardboard starship to fly us to the stars!). Remember that young kids’ imaginations are way better than ours as adults, so let them run with it.
Celebrate the women in your extended family who have interesting jobs- in science, architecture, a small startup- and have them tell your kids about it
Go old school. Kids still love to play board games. Print off pictures of powerful women- from politicians to pilots- that you can glue to cardboard and use as pieces in any of your favourite family games instead of the regular pieces.
And remember moms, research shows that this isn’t just about our kids. A study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology found that working women who viewed images of powerful women succeeded in stressful leadership tasks. So have fun with it!
Kim Wilson
Media Advisor & Consultant of The Center for Scholars & Storytellers
Disclosure: This blog post was written independently and reflects the author’s own views. It was written in support of the Dream Gap project and was paid for by Barbie.
Dreams of a Six Year Old Girl
Have you ever spoken to a six year old girl? Seemingly the epitome of confidence,the world is her oyster, and she believes she can be anything:
An astronaut;
A ballet dancer;
The President;
All at the SAME TIME.
Moreover, young girls frequently do better than boys in elementary school, where their abilities to sit still and follow rules often makes their teachers give them plenty of gold stars.
The traditional thinking is that young girls’ confidence doesn’t drop until they hit puberty. But something else is happening during the ages of five to seven, as children develop cognitively, becoming aware that others are evaluating their behavior.
As a well designed experiment found, at five years of age, girls say that both genders are smart, but by six years old, they classify boys as belonging to the “really really smart” category at a higher rate. Thus, what children see and hear during this developmental stage shapes thinking in ways that adults may not always see or recognize.
In fact, even at younger ages, children quickly absorb the stereotypes we communicate about activities and skills associated with each gender. Children learn in the context of their social and cultural milieu and the messages they are given (from parents, media, teachers and other socialization agents) promote gender identities, sometimes with stereotypes attached to them.
The good news is that in the US, things may be starting to change. One study found that when asked to draw a scientist, kids in the United States increasingly draw women. Back in the sixties and seventies, when asked the same question, less than one percent of children drew a female scientist. Today the average is twenty eight percent. But still, as kids get older, they begin to draw more men in this role. At five or six girls draw the same number of men and women, but by seven and eight they begin to draw more men.
So there is still plenty of work to do. Luckily research has helped us become more aware of these biases. Moreover, companies who create media and product for kids are helping change entrenched patterns. Many companies are focusing on creating strong female characters, and their audience is responding – even boys!
What can you do to help encourage your child to dream big and help your girl recognize that boys and girls are equally “really really smart? One answer: Play! Play helps girls understand the possibilities because this is when children practice the gendered behaviors they see from role models. And young kids like to play with the objects that will teach them the most.
Here are a few ways caregivers can support their children so they start to internalize gender equality:
Choose media that highlight strong female role models.
Why? Because research shows that representation shapes the way we think.
2. Highlight real life female role models, including yourself if you are a woman.
Why? Because connecting to the real world helps make children understand what’s truly possible. And young girls focus on what their female caregiver is doing.
3. Encourage boys to diversify their play patterns. Support their play with dolls, and help them recognize that women are equally brilliant to men.
Why? Because until we recognize that boys can enjoy more “feminine” pursuits, masculine stereotypes of strength and brilliance will persist and undermine progress for women.
Yalda T. Uhls, Ph.D.
Founder and Executive Director of the Center for Scholars & Storytellers
Disclosure: This blog post was written independently and reflects the author’s own views. It was written in support of the Dream Gap project and was paid for by Barbie.
Technology in Tandem: Designing for Joint Media Engagement
Technology in Tandem: Designing for Joint Media Engagement
“Daddy, what’s that?”
“Oh, that’s a walker – it helps people walk when they are a little unsteady. You remember when Grandma was in the hospital after her surgery? She used a walker to help her get around until her leg was feeling better. It looks like the beaver in the show is using a walker while he gets better too!”
There’s a common saying that kids are like sponges, soaking up everything around them. And it’s not wrong – kids can pick up a lot. But study after study shows that when it comes to media, like TV, apps, and ebooks, children can absorb the most when an adult uses the media with them. For example, one study conducted at the University of Delaware in the Child’s Play Learning and Development Lab, found that 4- and 5-year-olds understood an e-book’s story better after they read it with a parent than after “reading” it alone using the audio narration. Interactions like the one above probably explain why. Audio narration can read the story to the child, but only an adult can stop to define an advanced word, describe a picture, or relate the story to their child’s life.
But how much do children and parents use media together?
Despite everything we know about how “joint media engagement” can help children learn, the data show that most of children’s media use happens alone. Only about a third of parents say that they watch TV with their children all or most of the time and only one in five parents say that they use tablets with their child that often. Similarly, only a third of parents report watching online videos with their child most of the time, and less than one in five report playing video games with their child that often. Perhaps not surprisingly, these statistics differ by age: Joint media engagement is highest with younger children and drops off drastically as children get older, especially for tablets and smartphones.
The role of the media itself
Very few media properties encourage adults to use media with children. Although media creators are quite good at making shows and movies that are appealing to children, whatever makes media irresistable for a 4-year-old is not likely to make most adults swoon with delight. Think about parents in the 1990’s complaining about the songs from Barney or those in the 2000’s who couldn’t stand Caillou’s constant whining. There are, of course, exceptions to this rule. The beloved PBS show Sesame Street features celebrity appearances and humor that is likely to go way over kids’ heads but is targeted right at the parents who might be sitting on the couch with them. Even if they don’t intend to watch with their children, seeing, for example, Tiffany Haddish or John Legend might entice parents away from preparing lunch or scrolling through their email to check out what their child is watching.
Tablets and smartphones however, may be used even less with children because these devices are not geared towards two people using them together. It feels natural to sit on the couch next to your child to watch a TV show together, but when was the last time you jointly used an iPad? Research has shown that when children use a tablet they place it in their laps or in front of their face, making it more difficult to share. When children use media on a big screen in the living room, parents can walk by and easily see what their child is watching. Likewise, computers are oriented vertically and have a screen large enough to view over the child’s shoulder. Today’s devices are convenient for use on-the-go, but their smaller screens and handheld nature mean that parents may struggle to see what their children are watching. That makes it doubly difficult to engage casually and jointly with your child and the screen.
Rethinking media design for joint engagement
Here are some tips about how media creators can craft content that requires joint media engagement:
When a child opens an app, it could default into a two-player mode, prompting them to go find a parent to collaboratively reach a goal in the game.
Activities in apps could allow for multiple screen touches simultaneously, so that parents and children can both be engaging at the same time.
Create apps that allow children and parents to play together on multiple screens; for example, a child playing on a tablet in the kitchen could send a digital invitation to their parent’s smartphone in the living room.
Consider both children and parents in designing their content.
In the end, we all know that media is often used as an activity for children when parents need to complete other tasks, as a “babysitter.” But media can have many uses, and children gain much from the kinds of casual interactions around media described in the story of grandma’s walker above. Media creators should think creatively about how they can engage multiple generations so that both parents and children can have fun and learn from using media together.
Rebecca Dore
Senior research associate at the Crane Center for Early Childhood Research and Policy at The Ohio State University.
Collaborator of the Center for Scholars and Storytellers
Roberta Golinkoff
Professor of Education at the School of Education at the University of Delaware.
Collaborator of the Center for Scholars and Storytellers
The Power of Talking to Kids
“Each time a woman stands up for herself, without knowing it possibly, without claiming it, she stands up for all women.”
-Maya Angelou
I have spent a lot of years as an executive in children’s content at public broadcasters. I’ve interviewed lots of young girls, and talked to them about many topics. Recently-with the Dream Gap research from Barbie- I wanted to chat with more girls. Such interesting research! Mostly, I talked to young girls I know, to see what they thought of the results of this research: that by the age of 5, girls begin to lose self-confidence in their intelligence and abilities. This was more than for my job, it was for me, other women, and girls for the future! A lot at stake.
As always, the girls had a lot to say, and I loved how quickly they came up with reasons for the results. Two young girls said that boys see boys when they watch TV...that most lead characters on shows are boys, making boys seem like they are smarter, because they are leaders. The girls are right. In North America, 65% of protagonists in kid’s shows are boys, with girls only being the main character about 35% of the time.
I spent last weekend with one of my best friends, her young daughter and her daughter’s bestie. The girls spent almost the whole time choreographing dance routines, so I wasn’t sure if they would be interested in this research. But it only took them a moment to talk about how they mostly hear about men in school. The historical leaders, presidents, prime ministers, heroes, astronauts and other people they are told about. They don’t hear about famous women nearly as much. They said they want to hear more about women leaders!
On my way home from the weekend away, I chatted with two 10 year old girls on my street about The Dream Gap Project. They agreed that girls would feel smarter if they saw more role models, and felt strongly about changing the names of all the schools. “They are all named after men,” one said. “That’s why we have to fight for girl power, ” said the other.
I felt so girl powered up after the weekend that I just wanted to say “Thanks, Barbie” for doing the research that can get lots of girls talking. All good movements start from the ground up, so we need our girls to feel empowered. Now we just have to find ways to make girls more present on tv shows, in school, and at the forefront of the world around them. I’m totally in and feel like I have to do my part. Girl power, indeed!
Because we love talking to kids, here’s a video we shot at the Center for Scholars and Storytellers with boys and girls reacting to the Dream Gap research.
Kim Wilson
Media Advisor & Consultant of The Center for Scholars and Storytellers
Disclosure: This blog post was written independently and reflects the author’s own views. It was written in support of the Dream Gap project and was paid for by Barbie.
To learn more about Barbie's work to close the Dream Gap click here.
“It Depends”
“It Depends” – The Most Annoying and Honest Response that I Give
“Does media violence harm young people?”
It depends.
“Do apps that are labelled educational actually help children learn better?”
It depends.
“Is multitasking problematic for teens?”
It depends.
“Can social media, like Facebook, really support social wellbeing?”
It depends.
As the director of one of the world’s largest centres for the study of young people and the media, and as the chair of the Children, Adolescents, and Media division of the International Communication Association, I get asked to talk about this field – A LOT. Phone calls from journalists are the norm. Invitations to speak globally flood my inbox. Parents and caregivers send messages. Creators send me pitches. Even family parties are flooded with questions. The topic of children and media is a topic that quickly sends everyone on high alert. Everyone has a perspective – and one they are ready to defend.
Some argue passionately that media has robust and meaningful effects that must be understood and capitalized upon. Others argue just as passionately that media has little effects in the grand scheme of things, and that media panics of our day are ‘much ado about nothing’. Some are convinced that today’s smartphone generation is dumbing itself down, others are convinced that the same generation will be far more equipped for the years to come thanks to their digital literacy and flexible thinking.
Everyone has a perspective.
So do I.
Except my perspective is not the popular one. My perspective often elicits a few eye rolls followed by the push to ‘pick a team’. (PS: I have picked a team … it’s the Philadelphia Eagles!)
Just as others passionately argue for their perspective, I passionately argue for mine – which is ‘It Depends’. You see, after more than a decade in this field, and after having a bird’s eye perspective of the field and its (enormous) growth for some time now – I know one thing for sure: Effects are not that simple.
Time and time again, we see that WHO a young person is dramatically influences the extent to which they select, experience, and are affected by media content. Age matters – this we know. But so too does a host of personality traits and range of background variables. Some children love sensation and they seek out fast-paced content, experience deep physiological reactions to it, and then experience intense effects. Other children with comparably lower need for sensation are uninterested or relatively unaffected by the content altogether. Same thing goes for differences in intelligence, or personality traits like degree of extroversion, trait empathy, curiosity, and more. And let’s not forget the larger context with which the child is growing up. My own research with colleagues at CcaM has shown remarkable differences in the extent to which media has any effects based on how parents mediate the home media environment, as well as based on the peer environment that surrounds young people.
Naysayers of media effects tend to suggest that the statistical media effects found in research studies are quite small, and as a result, are relatively meaningless. Proponents of media effects like to hold up these effects and highlight how many effects are similar in strength to those found in investigations on the relationship between smoking and lung cancer.
But I am not taking a side on this.
I don’t see these effect sizes as anything else than what they are – an aggregate of the relationship between media exposure and media effects. And while statistical effect sizes help us understand what is going on for most people, they can easily mask the messier truth: specifically, that a minority of children may be particularly influenced by (certain kinds) of media, while others may be less or unaffected altogether.
This perspective doesn’t make me popular. My response doesn’t lend itself to soundbites or so-called “chocolate headlines”. It frustrates people. How can we, after so many years of research, still say “it depends”? Well, think about it. The media space is changing fast and furiously. So fast that I find myself texting my godson to tell me about the newest social media space I should know, and have him help me decipher what teens mean when they write #OOTD (… in case you were wondering, it’s Outfit Of the Day…). We are barely keeping pace with a media space that is increasingly on-demand, increasingly portable, and increasingly personalized. At the same time, our context of use is ever more complicated … the so-called ‘family hearth’ is a thing of the past. And, our ability to understand and study what young people bring to the media experience is more advanced than ever before. If you had told me 15 years ago that I could look at patterns of brain activity with fMRI to understand how Instagram use impacts teens’ neural processing, I would have looked at you with a blank stare. I am not saying our lessons of old aren’t valuable – they are, immensely so. But … we are in a new space that is increasingly complicated and I believe we do a disservice to our community if we make bold un-nuanced claims to effects.
Life is messy. It’s not that surprising that our research findings are messy as well. Rather than fight the mess, I am trying to embrace it. Sure, some days it makes me want to pull my hair out as I battle another manuscript or try to find a clear answer for a journalist. Some days I find it frustrating that I cannot put everything into a neat and organized list for parents as they ask for tips about how to best manage their home media environment. Sometimes I wish I had a chocolate headline to share. It would be easier, that’s for sure.
But easy is overrated, right?
It depends.
Jessica Taylor Piotrowski, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, University of Amsterdam
Director, Centre for Research on Children, Adolescents, and the Media (CcaM)
Collaborator of The Center for Scholars and Storytellers
Dr. Jessica Taylor Piotrowski is the Director of the Centre for research on Children, Adolescents, and the Media at the University of Amsterdam. She is the co-author of the book “Plugged In: How Media Attract and Affect Youth”. You can download an open-access copy of the book from the publisher’s website (https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300218879/plugged). A Philadelphia native, Jessica traded cheesesteaks, cars, and the Liberty Bell for stroopwafel, running routes, and windmills in 2012 – and hasn’t looked back since. You can find her on the web at www.jessicataylorpiotrowski.com… or running her next marathon somewhere in Europe.