Although the debate about whether very young children should use media rages on, estimates of young children’s media use continue to rise. In 1971, the average age at which children began watching television was about four years old.18 As discussed earlier, today it is around four months. The question, of course, is who is right? Should very young children be discouraged from interacting with any media? Is there reason for concern? Or are there opportunities to be gleaned from media?
Research into the benefits and drawbacks of media use among very young children is scarce but promising. On the one hand, some studies suggest that media use at very young ages can be detrimental to healthy activities, such as playtime and parent-child interaction. Studies have also yielded evidence for a “video deficit,” which means that very young children learn better from a real-life model than from a model on a screen. On the other hand, more recent research has convincingly shown that the video deficit can be mitigated, for example, when the media content is repeated or when a parent actively explains the content. And numerous studies have shown that developmentally appropriate educational media can support both cognitive learning (for example, numeracy, literacy) and social-emotional learning (friendliness, sharing, acceptance of diversity), particularly when parents are involved with the content their children consume.19
With the quick adoption of touch screens by this young audience, there is likely to be an influx of studies designed to address this question. For now, it seems fair to say that limited exposure to content that is sensitive to the developmental level of this young audience may be, at minimum, unimpactful and, at best, supportive of children’s cognitive and social-emotional development. We discuss this issue in greater detail in chapters 11 (“Media and Education”) and chapter 14 (“Media and Parenting”).
Two to Five Years
From age two onward, children deal with media entirely differently from how they did before. Piaget called the period between two and six the preoperational stage. This stage is characterized by symbolic thinking—the ability to use a symbol to stand for something that is not there. Such a symbol can be a drawing of a specific event, or a box that the child uses as a boat. Children must develop symbolic thinking in order to engage in the activities of the preoperational stage, such as imitation, drawing, and pretend play. Piaget called children’s thinking in this stage preoperational because unlike operational thinking, which characterizes middle childhood, preoperational thinking is not yet logical or tied to the law of cause and effect.
Stories Now Matter
Between eighteen and twenty-four months of age, children become increasingly interested in narratives. No longer drawn primarily by orienting features, they begin to pay attention to (short) stories from beginning to end, and are eager to know how things will turn out. As their interest in narratives grows, their understanding of television program content makes an equally huge leap forward. Their vocabulary expands rapidly in this period. A two-year-old knows a few hundred words, but by the time she turns six, her vocabulary will have grown to approximately ten thousand words. Unsurprisingly, this newly acquired vocabulary brings with it an interest in audiovisual narratives.
Using an in-home observation study, Patti Valkenburg and Marjolein Vroone documented this shift in attention from orienting features to meaningful content by observing the viewing patterns of children ages six months to five years who were shown an array of program content (adult news, Sesame Street, Teletubbies, and The Lion King II).20 Results showed that at around two and a half years of age, children begin to appreciate stories. This could be inferred, for example, from the nature and frequency of their questions. At that age, almost half the children asked questions while watching in order to help them better understand the events in the programs.
This study confirmed that children’s preferences for media content change rapidly during early childhood. For example, the scenes of Teletubbies (a show designed explicitly for young toddlers) that attracted the full attention of those up to two years old disappeared almost entirely from the list of favorite scenes of the five-year-olds. The only scene that continued to attract considerable attention in both age groups was one in which a piece of “Tubbie toast” suddenly flies through the air. But sudden movement of this kind always captures the viewer’s attention, regardless of his or her age, because it stimulates the orienting reflex. Both adults and children react in this manner to a sudden movement, a flash of light, or a loud noise, even before they can identify what it is. Young children, older children, and adults do not differ that much regarding the kinds of stimuli that grab their attention, but they do differ in the ones that hold it.
Blurry Boundaries: Fantasy and Reality
During the early childhood years, toddlers and preschoolers can be deeply awed by certain fantasy characters. Yet at the same time, if the fantasy characters become too grotesque, children can easily become frightened of them. This is due to the development of their symbolic thinking, their imagination, which undergoes a powerful transformation at this age. The first expressions of symbolic thinking begin when children are about eighteen months old. At that age, they can pretend that a banana is a telephone, for example. Once they reach three or four, their imaginary games become more complex and social in nature. They are able to think up and develop complex scenarios; play house, doctor, or fireman; and pretend they are traveling to uninhabited islands and distant planets. Piaget believed that children in the preoperational stage were incapable of separating fantasy from reality. More recent research, however, suggests that children as young as three can distinguish reasonably well between fantasy and reality, although it is easy to get them to doubt themselves.21 The following conversation between a mother and her three-year-old daughter illustrates this superbly:
MOTHER: “What shall we have for dinner?”
KATIE: “Daddy.”
MOTHER: “That’s a good idea, yes, with ketchup.”
KATIE: “Let’s have Mommy for dinner.”
MOTHER: “With ketchup?”
KATIE: “Yes.”
MOTHER: “But then Mommy would be eaten all up. I’d be all gone if you had me for dinner.”
KATIE: (looking upset) “. . . It’s just pretend.”22
Toddlers and preschoolers generally know when they are fantasizing. Nonetheless, they have more trouble than older children with “reality monitoring” (that is, with distinguishing imagined from real actions). Even when children know that a movie such as Disney’s Frozen is “just pretend,” they may still feel terrified while watching it. The boundary between fantasy and reality in this age group is clearly permeable, as the following conversation between two three-year-olds shows:
“Pretend there’s a monster coming, OK?”
“No, let’s don’t pretend that.”
“OK, why?”
“Cause it’s too scary, that’s why.”23
Thus, it seems that toddlers and preschoolers do understand the difference between fantasy and reality, at least in their own play. But at what age can they tell whether media content is fantasy or reality? That ability grows gradually between the ages of three and ten. Up to about age four, children generally believe that everything in the media is real. Two- and three-year-olds may even think that television characters live inside the TV set. If they see an egg breaking on television, they may run to the kitchen for a paper towel to clean it off the screen.24 According to Dafna Lemish, this response generally disappears by the time children are about two because by then they have learned that the screen always feels the same (cold and flat).25 But in our work, we have found that some three-year-olds still walk up to the screen, for example, to wave at a beloved television character or to kiss or grab it (in vain).26
Children’s struggle with separating fantasy from reality in the media influences their media preferences. First, fantasy characters are often just as engaging as real-life ones. Children first start identifying with media characters around age three. But because all characters are
real to them, they can identify just as easily with an animal or a fantasy character as with a real-life one. They are also deeply affected by special effects and stunts, such as a hero disappearing in a puff of smoke. Because toddlers and preschoolers do not understand the cinematic tricks behind such events, they are much more susceptible to their effects. By the time they are three years old, children know when they themselves are pretending, but they are unable to apply their knowledge of fantasy and reality when watching fiction. Symbolic thinking improves steadily in toddlers and preschoolers, but because their thinking is not yet bound by the laws of logic, everything is possible in their minds. That is why young children are so awed by certain fantasy characters, and that is why they are also more easily frightened by them.
Simple Is Successful
Media content for young children is generally populated by uncomplicated, colorful, friendly dolls and puppets. Up to age five, children are visually oriented toward information in general and media characters in particular. When describing their favorite media characters, children often fixate on simple physical traits, such as big eyes and long hair, without integrating these traits into an overall picture. Young children often pay little to no attention to what the characters are doing, or why.
The tendency to focus on simple physical traits of a media character instead of on his or her behavior once again reflects children’s level of development. One of the most distinctive qualities of children’s thinking between the ages of two and five is their tendency to focus on the immediately perceptible features of an object, product, or person, and to ignore information that is less explicitly perceptible. This phenomenon is called perceptual boundedness.27 Cynthia Hoffner and Joanne Cantor clearly demonstrated this tendency in an experiment in which they had three groups of children (three- to five-year-olds, six- to seven-year-olds, and eight- to nine-year-olds) watch a film with a female protagonist. The researchers manipulated the protagonist’s appearance (ugly or attractive) and behavior (kind or cruel). The three- to five-year-olds were more likely than the older children to say that the ugly character was cruel even if her behavior was kind. They were also more likely to find the attractive woman kind even if her behavior was cruel. Older children, on the other hand, were more likely to judge the protagonist by her behavior rather than her appearance.28
Closely related to perceptual boundedness is the concept of centration. According to Piaget, this is the tendency in young children to focus their attention on one visually striking feature while ignoring other, less striking visual attributes.29 A good example can be found in a study reported by Daniel Acuff and Robert Reiher, in which a group of young girls were given three dolls. Two of the dolls were very expensive, with beautifully modeled faces and advanced mechanical effects. The third doll was much more cheaply made, with a coarse face and no mechanical extras. It did have a large red sequined heart sewn on its dress, however. To the astonishment of the researchers, almost all the girls preferred the cheap doll with the red-sequined heart.30 This is typical behavior for toddlers and preschoolers. As they evaluate a product, they focus on a single striking feature, limiting their ability to take in multiple details simultaneously, including details that reflect quality. This is especially the case when children are presented with a product or stimulus for the very first time. After repeated exposure, they develop a better eye for details. This is why children like to watch their favorite movies over and over again. Every time they watch them, they discover something new.
Familiarity Is Fun!
Children between two and five years of age prefer to watch television shows that offer them a familiar context with situations that they recognize and that happen close to their own home. They enjoy watching shows that feature other toddlers and preschoolers, or simple, friendly fantasy characters. They also take a special interest in objects and animals that they know and can label verbally, such as a dog, a cat, or a bear. It is no wonder, then, that many picture books, apps, and television programs for toddlers concern situations in and around the home.
Children’s preferences for the familiar can be attributed to their nascent ability to process information. From two to five years of age, their memory span (that is, the list of numbers or words that they can retain in short-term memory) doubles in capacity, and the speed at which they process information increases proportionally. Despite these cognitive advances, much information is still too complex for young children. Why is this? Compared to older children, they have fewer experiences to which they can relate new information. In the literature, it is sometimes said that young children’s responses are stimulus driven, whereas older children’s responses are more schema driven. Compared with their younger peers, older children have more knowledge to help them select, encode, organize, and process new information.
It is no wonder, then, that young children need more time than older ones to interpret and understand media content, and that they prefer watching slow-paced television shows that involve a lot of repetition. Repetition provides them the opportunity not only to overcome centration (discussed above), but also to “master” the stories. Just as adults might need to read a difficult text a few times before they can grasp it, toddlers and preschoolers find support by watching the same scenes over and over again.
Self-Conscious Emotions: Jealousy, Pride, and Empathy
Ever since Darwin’s treatise on emotions in man and animals, we have differentiated between the emotions present from the beginning, in infancy, and the emotions that develop later in childhood. According to Paul Ekman, the first category consists of six basic emotions: enjoyment, surprise, anger, fear, sadness, and disgust. What these six basic emotions have in common is that they first appear early in infancy, their onset is quick and unbidden, and they give rise to universal facial expressions that are similar across cultures.31
Between the ages of two and three, children develop more complex feelings, known as self-conscious emotions. These include shame, jealousy, pride, empathy, and guilt. Self-conscious emotions appear only after children develop a sense of self-awareness, which generally starts at around twenty-two months.32 To feel self-conscious emotions, children must understand that there are norms and rules. After all, a child can feel an emotion such as shame only if it knows that it has done something wrong. To experience self-conscious emotions, children also need to have reached a certain level of social-emotional development. For example, they need to understand why someone might be sad or disappointed, or why a person might love someone else. Only then will they be able to feel empathy or jealousy.
The moderate discrepancy hypothesis predicts that children will prefer media products that reflect their own experience as closely as possible. Media products that are successful with this target group therefore key into their social-emotional development. Toddlers and preschoolers identify closely with media characters and want to see those characters expressing emotions that they recognize in themselves. But the perceptual boundedness of this age group requires emotions to be portrayed visually and straightforwardly. Complex emotions, for example, crying while happy, are generally confusing. In the following example, a teacher tells Cathy (age four) about a surprise party that someone threw for her:
CATHY: “Why did you cry? Were you sad?”
TEACHER: “No, I was happy.”
CATHY: “Did you get hurt?”
TEACHER: “No, but sometimes when you are really happy you cry too.”
CATHY: “Oh.” (said with a puzzled look).33
With Development Comes Gender
As almost any parent can tell you, a girl between the ages of three and seven may at some point adamantly refuse to leave the house unless she is wearing a pink frilly dress. In the United States, where store shelves are crammed with pink princess dresses and blue Spiderman suits, people refer to it as the Pink Frilly Dress Phenomenon (see figure 4.1). Almost every child goes through a phase of wanting to wear “real” girls’ or boys’ clothing. Boys avoid wearing anything that h
as even the slightest hint of femininity, and girls reject any apparel that smacks of masculinity. Two-thirds of three- and four-year-olds and 44 percent of five- and six-year-olds become extremely rigid about gender-specific behavior at a certain period.34
How do boys and girls develop such distinct preferences? Are they born with different tastes, or do the differences appear when they are older? Researchers agree that until they reach twelve to eighteen months, infants scarcely differ in their preferences for toys and entertainment. Both find dolls, cars, and trucks equally enjoyable. Nor do they differ in their television, video game, or picture book preferences. Animated or cartoon characters might just as well be gender-neutral in entertainment targeting young toddlers, and in fact they often are.
Figure 4.1. The Pink Frilly Dress Phenomenon, commonly seen among three- to seven-year-old girls. (Shutterstock)
But these gender-neutral preferences changes very quickly. Researchers have discovered gender differences in children’s toy preferences in toddlers as young as fourteen months old. By the time children are three, the observable differences are more apparent. At that time, boys and girls avoid playing with toys that they consider appropriate for the opposite sex. They become interested in different activities and prefer same-sex playmates. Known as gender segregation, this process takes place across social environments and cultures. Groups of boys and girls have different standards of social interaction, and those standards have a significant influence on children’s socialization.35
Why does behavior start out as gender-neutral for the first eighteen months or so of a child’s life, but change thereafter? There are several different explanations, none of them mutually exclusive. Biological or biosocial explanations suggest that gender differences are rooted in genetic and hormonal differences between men and women and that society merely exaggerates those differences.36 Second, gender differences can be ascribed to differences in the way boys and girls are reared. From birth, parents expect different kinds of behavior from their sons and daughters, and they express those expectations in their communication with their children. For example, they speak to boys and girls differently, dress them differently, and give them different toys.
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