4
INFANTS, TODDLERS, AND PRESCHOOLERS
When the first baby laughed for the first time, its laugh broke into a thousand pieces and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies.
—James M. Barrie, Peter and Wendy / Peter Pan (1911)
Anyone who has ever worked with or spent time with young children knows that infants, toddlers, and preschoolers differ considerably in their media preferences. Although some of these young children take little or no interest in television, smartphones, or tablets, most find them endlessly fascinating. In this chapter, we discuss how media preferences evolve from birth through early childhood. The focus is on two age groups, infants and young toddlers (up to 2 years old) and older toddlers and preschoolers (2–5 years). For both age groups, we describe a number of specific developmental characteristics and predict how they influence these young children’s media preferences. At what age do infants begin to take an interest in media, and why at that age? Why are toddlers so fascinated by smartphones and tablets? Should very young children even be using media? What is the “pink frilly dress” phenomenon and how does it influence media preferences? And finally, why exactly is development such a strong predictor of media preference?
Child Development and Media Preferences
Although many factors can influence children’s media preference, one of its most important predictors—particularly in the early years—is developmental level. Generally speaking, child development can be divided into two categories: cognitive development and social-emotional development. Cognitive development encompasses all age-specific changes associated with the way children acquire and process information in their environment. Cognitive development, in part, helps us understand how well children are able to pay attention and comprehend media content. While numerous theories have been developed to explain children’s cognitive development, Jean Piaget—considered by many to be the founding father of developmental psychology—proposed four successive stages of cognitive development from infancy to adulthood.1 His stage-based paradigm remains among the most widely used theories of cognitive development. And it is the point of entrance we take in this book to help us understand how children’s cognitive development predicts their media preferences.
Like children’s cognitive development, their social-emotional development helps us understand their media preferences. Social-emotional development concerns our ability to express and recognize emotions such as happiness, sadness, jealousy, and shame; to form interpersonal relationships; and to develop an identity (answering the question “who am I?”). Social-emotional development closely hinges on cognitive development. For example, we would not feel shame, jealousy, or other emotions without knowledge and understanding of the world in general and of interpersonal relationships in particular. And empathy, our capacity to share another’s emotions, would be difficult to feel if we did not understand the situation and person whose emotions we were sharing.
The notion that children’s cognitive development and social-emotional development are strong predictors of their media preferences first arose in the 1970s, when television researchers became interested in the cognitive effects of educational television shows. At the time, media researchers based their work on a reactive model of television viewing, which postulated that striking program features, such as sound effects, rapid action, and quick changes of scenery, influenced how closely children paid attention to educational broadcasts. The idea was that if producers successfully incorporated these features into their programs, they would automatically gain children’s attention and foster their comprehension and retention.
The reactive model came under increasing fire in the 1980s and beyond, particularly in response to studies by Daniel Anderson and colleagues, who—inspired by Piaget’s perspective on cognitive development—showed that striking program features had less influence on children’s attention than assumed. Their studies instead showed that children took little or no interest in programs that they had trouble comprehending. Much research thereafter has confirmed that media’s ability to hold a child’s attention depends largely on the child’s comprehension schemata and, thus, his or her level of cognitive development.2 By the late 1980s, when developmental psychologists had become interested in emotions, researchers began to recognize that social-emotional development is also a crucial predictor of media interest.
Today, we understand that cognitive development and social-emotional development play independent and interdependent roles in predicting children’s media preference. Moreover, we know that the relationship between media use and child development is reciprocal. Just as development exerts a strong influence on children’s media use and preferences, media use also influences the cognitive and social-emotional development of children. This reciprocal perspective is one that we take throughout this book.
Moderate Discrepancy Hypothesis
Why, precisely, are young children interested in media content? Many researchers believe that the concept of optimal stimulation level goes a long way toward explaining this interest. According to this concept, children prefer content that they can at least partly fit into their cognitive and social-emotional frame of reference. They equally avoid content that diverges too much from that frame of reference, because they perceive such content as either too easy or too difficult to grasp. This idea, known as the moderate discrepancy hypothesis, predicts that children will pay the most attention to media content that diverges only moderately from their level of cognitive and social-emotional development.
Studies have shown that children are much more likely to pay attention to media content that does not diverge too much from their existing knowledge and emotional experiences, and that they avoid content that does.3 The moderate discrepancy hypothesis thus offers a reasonable explanation of why children’s media preferences change throughout childhood. After all, the perceived difficulty or simplicity of media content changes dramatically as children grow older. Content that is moderately discrepant and therefore interesting to a two-year-old is often too simple, and thus boring, to a child of six. As is made clear throughout this book, the moderate discrepancy hypothesis can be used to explain the many changes in children’s media preferences as they grow.
No Two Children Are Alike
In this chapter, we differentiate between two age groups in childhood, zero to two years (infants and young toddlers) and two to five years (older toddlers and preschoolers). Dividing childhood into age categories has its limits, however, since individual differences among children in the same age group might thereby be underestimated or even ignored. No two two-year-olds are alike, after all. We know that from birth, children can respond quite differently to the same experience. Development is driven not only by a biologically programmed, fixed process of maturation, but equally by children’s temperament and social environment. As the Swiss philosopher Rousseau discerned more than two centuries ago, a child’s environment can be positive and stimulating, but also negative and corrupting.
Although children in the same age group can differ considerably from one another, average preferences are a reasonable starting point. Anyone who wishes to communicate effectively with children has to start somewhere. We can appeal to children of a specific age only if we know their average, age-specific preferences and their general perceptions of the world. That is why in the following sections (and throughout this book), we describe the most important cognitive and social-emotional characteristics of each of the two age groups and then predict how these characteristics influence their media use and preferences. That said, it is important to keep in mind that the characteristics of media use and preferences described here represent “average” behaviors, and so we encourage researchers and practitioners to consider the role of relevant individual differences whenever feasible.4
Birth to Two Years
Even as newborns, infants have a strong desire for sensory experience, whether it involves their sense of touch, hearing,
or vision. Piaget called the period from birth to two years the sensorimotor stage because it is then that a child’s sensory and motor skills become integrated.5 In plain English, we might refer to this as the “looking and grabbing” stage. A child in this stage of development wants to touch whatever she or he sees, and look at whatever she or he touches.
Some sensory preferences of children appear to be innate, whereas most others are shaped early in childhood. Some of children’s flavor and scent preferences, for example, seem to be inborn, as are some rhythmic and musical preferences. Infants as young as three months show a preference for music—orienting their head toward all kinds of music, including lullabies and Mozart preludes.6 Newborns favor the human voice above all other sounds, especially when speech is slow and high-pitched and intonation is exaggerated—in short, the form of speech parents generally adopt when speaking to their infants. Research has shown that four-month-olds prefer to listen to a recording of this “parentese” rather than to a recording of someone speaking with standard intonation.7 Children’s preference for speech with a variable pattern of intonation persists for the first few years. It is thus not surprising that entertainment media using this form of speech is successful with this age group.
Although newborns can hear reasonably well, their sense of vision is initially underdeveloped. They can see colors and motion, but the images are blurry. Objects more than half a meter away are out of focus. Their vision will not match that of an adult’s until they are about eight months old. This may explain why infants prefer high-contrast images. In the first few months of life, infants focus mainly on high-contrast areas of the face such as the eyes and hairline, directing their attention to objects that they can see best, meaning those with bold contrasts.
From very early on, infants prefer looking at human faces. In fact, they prefer to look at faces more than at any other stimulus. They also pay more attention to attractive (that is, symmetrical) faces than to unattractive ones. They have a preference for brightly colored moving objects (although the colors should not be too bright), especially if they also make noise (rattling, whistling, or jangling). They can distinguish colors immediately after birth, and by the time they are one month old they can differentiate between all colors in the spectrum.8 It is no wonder that toys and media entertainment targeting infants and toddlers tend to be brightly colored.
Interest in Television and Commercials
Children below the age of two spend nearly an hour a day viewing or using audiovisual media (television, DVDs, games, tablets).9 Interestingly, the age at which infants and toddlers start using media has fallen in the past decade; the current age is now estimated to be between three and five months. Developmentally, this age makes sense. By this age, vision has significantly improved, and children are thus able to follow moving objects on the screen. Moreover, around this age, the “social smile” emerges—the process of smiling when children hear or see something that they perceive as appealing. It is also around this age that infants begin to orient themselves toward situations that interest them, including media content. Nevertheless, research by Alissa Setliff and Mary Courage shows that children differ enormously in how much interest they take in audiovisual media. In their study, sixty six-month-olds were offered appealing moving toys while a television was on in the background. In the ten minutes that the television was on, children looked up from their toys an average of 23 times. The differences between children were immense. Some infants looked up from their toys only twice in the ten-minute period, whereas others did so almost constantly, up to sixty-one times.10
Given young children’s attraction to bright colors and high contrast, it makes sense that they are most attracted to programs with colorful fantasy characters such as Teletubbies or Big Bugs Band. Perhaps surprisingly, very young children are often attracted to commercials. Given the structure of a commercial, this actually makes a good deal of sense. The first year of life is characterized by what some researchers refer to as the investigative-orienting system of attention. In other words, children’s attention in the first year is directed mainly at objects that are novel or surprising. And commercials, with their striking auditory and visual features (also called orienting features), are exactly the type of content that is attuned to young children’s system of attention. By the second year of life, as children’s attention becomes guided less by such orienting features and more by their own cognition, they become less attracted by novelty and more by objects that have real meaning for them.11
Do Stories Matter for the Very Young?
People often think that watching television is a passive activity, but this is a misconception—certainly where very young children are concerned. Most people would agree that playing a game on a computer or tablet is not a passive activity, but children are also verbally and physically active when they watch television. They imitate what they see, and sing and dance along with television characters. They also do their best to understand the content and fit it into their conceptual frameworks, for example, by asking frequent questions about the content they are watching.12
Children usually say their first real words at about age one. Those first words are the same in almost every language. They reflect the universal preferences of one-year-olds, for example, people (mama, papa, grandma), animals (dog, cat), toys (ball, dolly), food (milk, cookie), and transportation (car). At the same time, one-year-olds feel the need to verbally label the things that they see or play with: 40 percent of children up to the age of two will call out the name of a television character while watching a show, or say aloud the names of objects that they see on the screen. They start to do this at fifteen months, the same age when they first imitate words or songs from a program, and sing or dance along with media characters.
Although very young children respond actively to media content, they usually do not yet understand story line. Children under eighteen months are just as interested in a video clip that mixes up beginning, middle, and end as they are in a clip with a coherent story line.13 In other words, infants and young toddlers are drawn to orienting program features, but they do not require meaningful context. That is why long stories are inappropriate for this age group, and why so much popular content for this audience lacks a narrative—it is simply not necessary.
Interest in Tablets
Although the majority of research on very young children and audiovisual media has focused on television, many infants and toddlers today are absolutely mesmerized by smartphones and tablets, as parents today are acutely aware. An ABC News report in 2013 demonstrated rather persuasively that most toddlers seem to prefer a tablet to a pile of colorful toys. One toddler in the news story even preferred a tablet to his own mother!14 As with television, infants’ interest in tablets seems to emerge between three and five months of age; current estimates suggest that more than a third of American parents allow their infants and young toddlers to play with a tablet, and other countries are showing similarly fast rates of adoption.15
When thinking of the developmental attributes of infants and toddlers, it is easy to see why this technology is so appealing. First, tablet screens are high contrast and are held closer than arm’s length, bringing them into the infants’ developing field of vision. Second, from a content perspective, the numerous “baby apps” available typically rely on colorful moving objects and characters and equally engaging sound effects—which appeal directly to children’s investigative-orienting system of attention. The tablet’s biggest plus, however, is that the software gives infants and young toddlers instant feedback. That is what fascinates them most, probably for the same reason that they enjoy switching lights on and off repeatedly or insist on playing with the remote control. Young children enjoy what they see as “magical” effects in their surroundings. Anything that changes because of an action on their part has their undivided attention.
This magical appeal of tablets for infants and toddlers can be explained by the moderate discrepancy hypothesis. In 1993, Erik
Strommen—who could not have anticipated the immense popularity of tablets in the new millennium—predicted that for very young children, the touch screen was the only suitable interface.16 A touch screen diverges only moderately from infants’ and toddlers’ motor and cognitive development, a phenomenon not experienced earlier in the history of digital media. It offers very young children everything they could possibly want: motion with interesting sounds, high-contrast images, new and constantly changing experiences, and instant feedback that fosters a sense of control.
“Under Twos” and Media: The Debate
Any discussion about the role of media among very young children would be incomplete if it did not acknowledge that such media use is controversial. In fact, many parents have mixed feelings about young children’s enthrallment with media content. And researchers and health care providers worldwide have prominently voiced concerns about this issue. In response to these concerns, health departments in the United States, Australia, and Canada now officially discourage screen media use for children under the age of two, and the French banned television stations from airing programs that target children under the age of three.17
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