PROSOCIAL CHILDREN’S TELEVISION

PROSOCIAL CHILDREN’S TELEVISION

Given children’s massive exposure to media, primarily television, it is all but inconceivable that they are not learning anything from it. Understanding children’s perceived reality and what they are learning from TV requires careful examination of both the content of the programs and the cognitive processing that the child is capable of at different developmental stages. Here, however, we focus on some specific projects designed to teach through television.

BOX 5.1

DOES TELEVISION INTERFERE WITH READING?

A common concern of many parents is that their children watch too much television and do not read enough. Beentjes and van der Voort (1989) identified several hypotheses about the effect of watching TV on reading and looked at the support for each of them.

A stimulation hypothesis argues that watching television stimulates or enhances reading. Not a theory that is widely held, only two small pieces of evidence support it, namely reading subtitles on foreign TV (see Box

12.2) and reading a book directly based on a TV show after watching the show (see Box 5.3). More widely believed and scientifically studied is some sort of reduction hypothesis, with TV watching having a negative impact on reading. There are five variations of this hypothesis. First, the passivity hypothesis (e.g., Healy, 1990) argues that TV causes children to become more mentally lazy and less prepared to invest the mental effort necessary for reading. Although it is true that TV requires less mental effort than reading (Salomon, 1984, 1987), viewers are far from totally passive. A second variety of reduction hypothesis is concentration- deterioration, which says that TV weakens a child’s ability to concentrate. There is really no support for this either. The least promising of the reduction hypotheses is probably the retardation hypothesis, which argues that TV deteriorates or rots the brain. The active verbal and visual information processing required in watching TV or any other medium makes this untenable. The anti-school hypothesis argues that TV leads children to expect school to be as entertaining as Sesame Street or Barney and Friends and, when it is not, they lose motivation. This is a difficult hypothesis to study empirically, and the evidence that does exist is inconclusive.

Finally, the displacement hypothesis argues that television hurts reading but only when it takes away time from reading Although all the

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research is not entirely consistent (Koolstra & van der Voort, 1996; Mutz, Roberts, & van Vuuren, 1993; Ritchie, Price, & Roberts, 1987), this hypothesis has the most support. If children watch TV instead of reading, it may diminish their reading skills. If they watch TV in addition to reading, there probably is no detrimental effect on reading. Regarding fantasy play, watching nonviolent TV programs does not interfere with children’s fantasy play, but violent shows reduce fantasy play (van der Voort & Valkenburg, 1994). Overall, TV appears to stimulate day dreaming but reduce creative imagination (Valkenburg & van der Voort, 1994).

Although there had been some specifically educational children’s shows on the U.S. commercial networks since the early 1950s (e.g., Ding Dong School, Romper Room, Captain Kangaroo ), by the mid-1960s there was increased interest in developing more children’s television programming that would be commercial-free, explicitly educational, socially positive, and of high technical quality. In the United States, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was founded in 1967, followed by the PBS in 1970. The artistic and technical quality of children’s programming greatly improved in this period, particularly with the founding of the Children’s Television Workshop (CTW) in 1968, initially supported by both public and private funds.

Sesame Street

The next year saw the debut of Sesame Street, one of the most important television shows of all time. Although it was only the first of several such shows, Sesame Street is still by far the most successful and popular young children’s show worldwide; it is seen in 130 countries with 19 different adaptations. As appropriate, it has been translated into many languages but is always locally produced and adapted to local culture (Fisch et al, 1999; Gettas, 1990). Its original stated purpose was to provide preschoolers with an enriched experience leading to prereading skills. With its urban and multicultural setting, the program was especially targeted at so-called disadvantaged children who often entered school less prepared for reading than their peers. In fact, however, the show appealed to children across the social spectrum. Regular characters like Big Bird, the Cookie Monster, Oscar the Grouch, and Bert and Ernie have become part of almost everyone’s childhood.

What the Show Is Like. The technical quality of Sesame Street has been consistently very high, using much animation, humor, and movement. There

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is a pleasing mixture of live action, animation, and puppet/muppet characters. Recognizing that commercials are familiar and appealing to young children, Sesame Street draws on many technical characteristics of ads (e.g., “This program has been brought to you by the letter H and the number 6.”). More recently the influence of music videos is apparent in the many segments that use that format. The segments are short, so as to not lose even the youngest viewers’ interest. In fact, even some infants under 1-year- old are regular watchers. Practically all people now reaching adulthood in many societies of the world have had some exposure to Sesame Street, and many have had very heavy exposure. In many markets it is shown 3 to 4 hours per day on PBS affiliates, and much more is available on video and DVD. In some weeks, 70 to 80% of 2- to 5-year-olds see it at least weekly, making it by far the most watched educational TV program in history.

There is also much wordplay and satire to amuse adults watching with their children or listening in the background. A rock band of insect muppets sings about nutrition in the song “Hey Food,” which just happens to sound a lot like the Beatles’ “Hey Jude.” There is also spoofing of its own network, PBS. The segment “Monsterpiece Theatre” featured a smoking-jacket-attired Cookie Monster (“Good evening. I’m Alastair Cookie.”) introducing classics about numbers and letters, including “The Old Man and the C,” “1 Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” and “The Postman Always Rings Twice.” In its own version of Lethal Weapon 3, Mel Gibson and Danny Glover duck a falling concrete number 3. Children are introduced to operatic music at the all-bird Nestropolitan Opera with conductor Phil Harmonic and lead tenor Placido Flamingo. Popular adult stars frequently put in guest appearances: Jay Leno, Glenn Close, Candace Bergen, Barbara Walters, Phil Donahue, Paul Simon, Robin Williams, and even the mayor of New York all visited Sesame Street. Adults who had earlier watched the show as preschoolers frequently have the feeling seeing Sesame Street as adults that there are a lot of nuances that they had missed earlier, unlike shows like Barney and Friends or Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, which have little intrinsic appeal to adults. This appeal is not accidental; children get more out of Sesame Street if their parents watch and discuss it with them, and the producers know that.

The intentional use of a multiracial, multiethnic, multiclass, and increasingly gender-balanced cast ensemble has set a valued social model for children as well; it provides a far more diverse and positive multicultural modeling than most of what is offered by commercial television. Among the human characters on the show, there have always been substantial numbers of women and members of diverse ethnic groups, who go about their business of being human, not particularly being members of some social group. Sometimes the teaching is more focused. For example, there is a heavy drawing from various Hispanic cultures, including Spanish and bilingual English-Spanish songs, such as “Somos Hermanos/We are

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Brothers.” On another occasion, the characters from Sesame Street took a trip to the Crow Reservation in Montana to learn about that particular Native American culture. There have also been visits to Louisiana to learn about Cajun culture and food and zydeco music.

Effects of Watching Sesame Street. Besides being the most watched young children’s TV show of all time, Sesame Street has also been the most extensively evaluated show, in terms of research. We turn now to some of the effects of watching Sesame Street (Fisch, 2002; Fisch & Truglio, 2000; Huston, Wright, Rice, Kerkman, & St. Peters, 1990).

As most parents realize, children’s attention and interest level while watching Sesame Street is high; preschoolers really do like the show. In terms of more substantive effects on learning, there is solid evidence for short-term effects, in the sense of vocabulary growth and the acquisition of prereading skills and positive social skills and attitudes, such as showing evidence of nonracist attitudes and behavior (D.R.Anderson, 1998; Ball & Bogatz, 1970; Huston & Wright, 1998; Rice, Huston, Truglio, & Wright, 1990). Those who watched Sesame Street also spent more time reading and doing other educational activities and needed less remedial instruction (Fisch, Truglio, & Cole, 1999; Zill, 2001), Longer term effects are less clear, with some early studies showing that the advantages of watching Sesame Street, compared to a control group not watching it, disappear after a few months or years (Bogatz & Ball, 1971). However, more recent longitudinal research has shown that heavy viewing of Sesame Street in preschool years is positively correlated with school grades in English, math, and science, even with early language ability and parental education level controlled (Huston, Anderson, Wright, Linebarger, & Schmitt, 2001; Huston & Wright, 1998).

Some interesting qualifications of these effects have been found. The positive effects are stronger if combined with parental discussion and teaching (T.D.Cook et al., 1975). This suggests that, among other functions, the program can serve as a good catalyst for informal media education within the family. Another interesting finding is that, at least initially, Sesame Street helped higher socioeconomic status children more than lower socioeconomic status children (Ball & Bogatz, 1970). Thus, the show had the ironic effect of actually increasing the reading readiness gap between the higher and lower socioeconomic status children, when its stated goal had been to decrease that gap. However, this result should not have been unexpected, because any kind of intervention generally most helps those who are most capable to begin with and thus more able to take full advantage of what it has to offer.

There were also positive social effects. Minority children watching Sesame Street showed increased cultural pride, confidence, and interpersonal cooperation (Greenberg, 1982) and more prosocial free play (Zielinska &:

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Chambers, 1995). Also, after 2 years of watching Sesame Street, White children showed more positive attitudes toward children of other races (Bogatz & Ball, 1971; Christensen & Roberts, 1983).

Although widely praised, Sesame Street does have its critics (e.g., Healy, 1990; Winn, 1977, 1987), who mostly fault its encouragement of passivity and short attention span, as well as its slighting of language skills by the necessarily highly visual nature of television. However, these criticisms are mostly general criticisms of television, with little recognition of the differential quality of programming. See D.R.Anderson (1998) for a careful discussion and refutation of specific claims of these critics.