Media, Children, and the Family

Social Scientific, Psychodynamic, and Clinical Perspectives

Dolf Zillmann, Jennings Bryant, Aletha C. Huston

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136690204
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book brings together a group of scholars to share findings and insights on the effects of media on children and family. Their contributions reflect not only widely divergent political orientations and value systems, but also three distinct domains of inquiry into human motivation and behavior -- social scientific, psychodynamic (or psychoanalytical), and clinical practice. Each of these three domains is privy to important evidence and insights that need to transcend epistemological and methodological boundaries if understanding of the subject is to improve dramatically. In keeping with this notion, the editors asked the authors to go beyond a summary of findings, and lend additional distinction to the book by applying the "binoculars" of their particular perspective and offering suggestions as to the implications of their findings. One of the goals of the conference that resulted in this book was consensus building in the area of media and family. From examining the findings and insights of a diverse group of scholars, it seems that consensus building in several areas is a distinct possibility. Addressing the concerns of educators about the influence of the mass media of communication -- entertainment programs in particular -- on children and the welfare of the nuclear family, this volume projects directions for superior programming, especially for educational television. The influence of sex and violence on children and adults is given much attention, and the development of moral judgment and sexual expectations, among other things, is explored. The critical analysis of media effects includes examination of positive contributions of the media, such as the search for missing children and exemplary educational programs.

Part I

MEDIA AND THE FAMILY

1

MEDIA INFLUENCE, PUBLIC POLICY, AND THE FAMILY

Aletha C. Huston

University of Kansas

Dolf Zillmann

Jennings Bryant

University of Alabama

Mass media are an integral part of virtually every society on the globe. Almost all children born in the United States in the 1990s will live in a home with at least one television set from Day 1 onward. Most children will have ready access to multiple television sets, many television channels, videotapes, videogames, computer games, magazines, books, audiotapes, and disks.

Mass media are distinct from other potential socializing institutions (e.g., schools, religious institutions) in several important ways: (a) Children’s primary contact with them occurs informally as part of the home and family environment rather than in structured settings and activities; (b) with some important exceptions, the contents of mass media are not planned or designed to educate, to enhance development, or to socialize children into the mores of their culture. Instead, media are often designed for entertainment or attracting audiences to advertisements; messages are conveyed but are incidental to the purposes of the producers; (c) children’s exposure to mass media begins in infancy. Long before most children enter any formal educational setting, they have watched hundreds of hours of television, and some of them have also had extensive contact with books and other media.

There is a widespread tendency to blame media for every social ill from declining academic skills among schoolchildren to the decay of morality in social conduct. A more muted, but continuing, theme extols the benefits conferred on society by mass media — instant information about world events, educational programming, and locating America’s most wanted criminals. In order to make a responsible assessment of these claims, we need to define media.

WHAT ARE MEDIA?

When people refer to “media” in these contexts, they usually mean television, although popular music lyrics have generated their share of social criticism. Television is certainly the predominant mass medium in the sense that it occupies an enormous number of hours for people of all ages and is a central part of home life for many people throughout the world. However, “television” is a constantly changing medium because of new technologies and new systems of production and distribution. Cable and satellite broadcasting systems enable many viewers to have access to large numbers of channels, many of which are concentrated on particular audiences or types of programming (e.g., sports, news, children, languages other than English). Videotapes and players are available in every supermarket, and the great majority of American homes contain a VCR. Remote controls are now routine equipment for television sets and VCRs, allowing viewers to shift readily and often among programs, to play tapes on fast forward and reverse, and so on. Computer technology has made possible computer games, videogames, and interactive activities with video images and sounds (Dorr & Kunkel, 1990).

The rapid dissemination of these technological changes has directly affected children and families in their home environments. The media environment in the average home in every industrialized country in the world was dramatically different in 1990 than in 1980.

Changing social mores and public policy have also led to changes in media content on conventional broadcast outlets (e.g., network television). With federal deregulation in the early 1980s came a reduction in the already small number of educational programs for children on commercial television and an increase in advertising to children (Condry, Bence, & Scheibe, 1988; Kerkman, Kunkel, Huston, Wright, & Pinon, 1990). There was little change in violence, but increasingly explicit sexual content.

Any discussion of the role of media in the lives of children and families must take account of the fact that media represent a moving target. The term encompasses many forms of communication that have undergone rapid changes during the years since World War II and will continue to do so.

The Family Concept

Society’s view of the family — what it is and what it ought to be — makes “family” as much a moving target as the media. The traditional conceptualization of the so-called nuclear family stipulates cohabitation by a man and a woman who are joined in marriage and who raise their own genetic offspring together. The only universally tolerated deviation from this model concerns the children’s genetic origin. The married couple is deemed entitled to care for children other than their own progeny and to assimilate them into the family unit.

This conceptualization of family has been severely challenged and drastically revised in recent years (Ahrons & Rodgers, 1987). Single-parent families, often but not necessarily residues of the nuclear family, have been growing in numbers and have gained general acceptance as nontransitory, permanent institutions of child nurturance. Moreover, in granting family status to cohabitational parent–child arrangements, the requirement of marital status for parents, single or otherwise, has been largely abandoned. Although not legally recognized in most locales, same-gender parenting by a couple is de facto accepted. Extended and multigeneration households and communal arrangements of adults with children, mostly composed of single parents and their progeny, are also accepted family forms.

In light of such changes it would seem prudent to abandon the idealized, narrow conceptualization of family in favor of a family concept capable of accommodating existing realities. For our purposes here, we can define family as cohabitational arrangements of adults and children in which the adults assume legal responsibility for the welfare and maturation of the children. This definition accommodates the nuclear family as much as alternative family forms of the present and future.

Media and Children

Children are a special audience (Dorr, 1986). Because of cognitive immaturity, they are generally assumed to be more vulnerable than adults to negative influences of television content (e.g., violence, pornography) and to the persuasive messages of advertising. Television is a particularly appealing medium to young children in part because many of its images and modes of representation are readily understood; it does not require the child to learn a complicated system of decoding as reading does, for example. As a result, it has enormous potential for contributing to children’s development through educational and prosocial programming. Television specializes in stories and fantasy that may play a major role in personality development. The chapters in this book include psychoanalytic (Ashbach; Derdeyn), clinical (Cline; Reed) and cognitive developmental (Alexander; Bryant & Rockwell; Cantor; Huston & Wright; Singer & Singer) perspectives on how children use and interpret what they see on television in both beneficial and detrimental ways.

Although some may disagree about how television affects children, no one disputes that they watch it a great deal. A conservative estimate is that the average child watches about 3 hours a day (Huston et al., 1992). Viewing time increases during the preschool years, drops a little around age 6 due to school entry, increases until late childhood, then drops again in adolescence.

The effects of viewing depend largely on the types of programs watched and the individual abilities and personality dispositions of the viewer. The chapters in this book offer a sample, by no means complete, of both positive and negative effects including education, prosocial behavior, coping with fear, personality development, violence, and pornography. In each domain, it is clear that children’s responses to television content depend on cognitive developmental levels, personal dispositions, and the environmental context of viewing. For example, preschool children are frightened by different types of content than are older children; moreover, the same content may create nightmares for one child and be the source of coping skills for another. Several papers concentrate on negative effects of sexual content, but there is as yet little investigation of how media can (or do) contribute in a healthy way to children’s learning about sex (cf. Roberts, 1982).

Media and the Family

Children’s use of media is socialized primarily in the family (cf. Bryant, 1990). Television is an integral part of family life. Viewing occurs primarily with other family members, especially for young children. For example, in one longitudinal study, more than 70% of the time that 3- to 7-year-old children spent watching general audience programming occurred with a parent (St. Peters, Fitch, Huston, Wright, & Eakins, 1991). Moreover, television habits are formed early. The amount of television viewed is quite stable from age 3 onward, probably because it depends on family patterns that do not change readily (Huston, Wright, Rice, Kerkman, & St. Peters, 1990).

Social critics often berate parents for failing to regulate their children’s television viewing. It is true that most parents exercise little control over the amount or kind of television their children watch. When they do regulate, they typically do so on the basis of program content rather than overall time. When parents encourage particular types of programs or exercise restrictions, there is some impact on their children’s viewing. However, parental example is probably the most important way in which parents influence their children’s television uses and abuses of television (St. Peters et al., 1991). Not only do parents provide a model of how to use television, but, because television is viewed in a communal part of the home (e.g., the living room, family room), children are exposed to what their parents watch simply by virtue of living in the same household.

Parents may also moderate or counteract the influences of television content on their children, once that content is viewed. Numerous studies indicate that adult discussion and explanation of content helps children to comprehend messages and increases the amount learned from educational programs. When parents and children discuss value issues raised by television (e.g., the justification for aggression), it is likely that children will be less influenced by negative content than when the television experience is unmediated (Desmond, Singer, & Singer, 1990; Wright, St. Peters, & Huston, 1990).

Television may also affect the family as a group — the ways they spend their time and the nature of their interactions with one another (Bryant, 1990). Families are often shown on television. Content analyses of their interactions help to understand the kinds of models portrayed (Skill, this volume). It is likely that families adopt some of the patterns they see on television, or that they consider those patterns normative. If the patterns involve hostile humor, lack of caring, or weak discipline, some people would argue that imitation would have negative effects on healthy family functioning. On the other hand, overly idealized patterns of family relationships could set a standard against which most real families compare poorly. Some critics have argued, for instance, that the Huxtable parents in the Cosby Show are unrealistically able to devote time and attention to their children in the midst of busy careers. Several of these possibilities are considered in the chapters in this book and in some earlier work (e.g., Brown & Bryant, 1990), but data are scant. The effects of family portrayals on viewers’ behaviors and expectations are important topics for future research.

Television effects on the family go beyond program content to impacts of the medium itself on patterns of family life, time spent together, and outside activities (Robinson, 1990). Participant observations have shown that television has many functions in families, ranging from determining schedules to defining what is “right” (Lull, 1990). The demands of the medium, regardless of content, can affect the types of interactions among family members. For instance, parents and children tend to talk less to one another when viewing television than in other activities, but they are often in close physical proximity (e.g., touching, hugging; Wright et al., 1990). Once again, the research in this area is sparse and needs expansion.

Clinical Implications

Clinicians often encounter “effects” of television, movies, or other mass media in clients’ fantasies and actions. Several chapters in this volume discuss the contributions of sexual media content to behavior disorders for both children and adults (Cline; Reed). Videotapes, some cable channels, and magazines have made hardcore pornography much more readily available to children growing up in the 1980s than in earlier decades (Huston et al., 1992). Clinicians and others have expressed considerable concern about the effects of pornography on children’s and adults’ views of “normal” sex, attitudes about sexual violence, and proneness to deviant sexual behavior.

Children are also the subjects in some pornographic films and magazines; campaigns against showing children or “pseudo-children” (adults dressed in childish costumes) did have some success by the end of the decade (Reisman, this volume). Children who participate in pornographic media are often sexually abused as well, a phenomenon that clinicians need to address (Silbert, 1989).

Television can also be used in prevention and treatment of emotional disturbance. Programs dealing with feelings, prosocial behavior, sensitivity to others, and coping with social problems have demonstrated effects on children’s positive social development. One of the first and best documented is “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood,” a program for preschoolers that emphasizes the basic goodness and individuality of each human being (Stein & Friedrich, 1975). In the present volume, positive effects of “Degrassi Junior High,” a program for young adolescents, are demonstrated (Singer & Singer). Clinicians can help parents and children select programs that are planned to deal with social and emotional issues in constructive ways.

Fears can also be dealt with through television. For example, well-designed films about surgery, going to the dentist, and the like can help reduce children’s fears of such procedures. Cantor’s work (this volume) includes a number of suggestions for ways in which parents and children can cope with fear-provoking content on television. A case study of a young boy (Derdyn, this volume) illustrates how a child’s fascination with horror films can be used to good advantage in treatment.

Public Policy

Children and families live in a media environment that is not of their own making. They can select from what is available, but they do not have many opportunities to increase or change the menu. Decisions about production and distribution of most mass media are made by private corporations. In this country, because of the First Amendment to the Constitution, those decisions are protected from government interference except in unusual circumstances. The voice of the ordinary citizen, therefore, can be heard through nongovernmental advocacy and through carefully delimited public policies.

Broadcast television is subject to federal regulation through the Communications Act of 1934 establishing that the a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Part I: Media And The Family
• Part II: Developmental and Educational Implications
• Part III: Effects Of Violence And Horror
• Part IV: Sexual Content And Family Context
• Part V Effects Of Erotica And Pornography
• Part VI: Social Awareness and Public Policy
• Author Index
• Subject Index