Regulating media use is thorny not only because children are intolerant of interference in the personal domain, but also because parents are more ambivalent, confused, or insecure about regulating this area than they are with other parenting issues. In the last few years, new communication technologies have supplanted one another at breakneck speed. What is new today is old tomorrow. In most families, the status of media has shifted from a small and incidental aspect of leisure time to a thoroughly embedded means of social interaction, in and outside the family. More than ever before, media play a functional role in the family by regulating household routines, facilitating family members’ communication, and even physically organizing family members within the house.11
According to Lynn Clark, author of The Parent App, the newest generation of mobile media has solved some parental dilemmas but exacerbated others. On the one hand, mobile media are a low-threshold way to enable family members to keep in contact with one another. They also make it easier for parents to follow their children’s activities and social contacts. On the other hand, mobile media can cause great concern and fear for parents, for example, because these media occupy much of their children’s attention, or because they offer children numerous opportunities to display (sexual) risk behavior at an early age.12
No unequivocal research-based answers have been found for many of the questions that parents ask about their children’s media use. For example, there is no clear-cut answer to the question of how much media use is “enough” or “too much.” Meanwhile, parents are faced with many often-conflicting ideas about media and their effects on their children, a lack of consensus that can easily make them feel insecure.13 Publications about the effects of media on children have traditionally been divided into utopian and dystopian discourses. Both schools of thought assume that technology influences all individuals equally under all circumstances: either positively, for utopians, or negatively, for dystopians. In truth, neither approach does justice to the complex and nuanced reality of today, in which children react in a variety of ways to media, sometimes even contrary to what developers expected or hoped for. These great differences in children’s susceptibility have significant implications for how parents approach and manage media.
Parental Mediation in the Twenty-First Century
Parental mediation refers to all the actions of adults aimed at making children media literate. In particular, it is about encouraging children to set limits on their media use, and to use media safely, selectively, and judiciously. Research on parental mediation began in the 1980s, when screen use was mostly limited to watching television. This strand of research traditionally distinguishes among three parental mediation styles: restrictive mediation (limiting time or content), active mediation (explaining and evaluating content), and co-viewing (watching television together without discussing the content).14
When television was children’s dominant screen use, researchers assumed that co-viewing would implicitly protect children from negative media influences and encourage them to learn from media. But research soon showed that co-viewing is not always effective. For example, when parents watch violent media content with their children, they can inadvertently give children the impression that they approve of violent content. In doing so, they may stimulate rather than restrain undesirable consequences of this kind of viewing. In the same vein, co-viewing of educational content can be beneficial because it similarly gives children the impression that the content is important, which may bolster the likelihood of learning effects.15
With the rise of digital and mobile media, however, parental mediation has required reconsideration. Today’s children and teens are senders as well as recipients of media content, and it is important for parents to consider both roles. And thanks to the mobility of media, youth spend more and more time with media in their private spaces, out of their parents’ sight, a phenomenon that has been called the bedroom culture. These developments have significant implications for parental mediation. Previously, the term “parental mediation” primarily elicited the idea of mediation, that is, parental interventions in the media content that reached their children. In the last few years, we have seen a shift from mediation to proactive media monitoring, that is, the supervision of what children are doing with media, and with whom, how, and when they are doing it.16
The term “proactive,” when used to describe media monitoring, comes from research on general parenting strategies. Proactive monitoring means that parents keep an eye on their children.17 Parents may wonder who their children’s friends are, whether they use alcohol, and where they go when they go out. Proactive monitoring is an essential element of parenting. Children of parents who do not monitor proactively are, compared with their actively monitored peers, at a greater risk for problem behaviors such as sexual risk taking and excessive alcohol or drug use.18 Modern parenting theories make it clear that general proactive monitoring is most effective when it is a two-way process—namely, when children are willing to share their needs and experiences with their parents.19 Seen in this light, proactive monitoring is a characteristic not of parents per se, but of the relationship between parents and children.
This same reciprocal process applies to proactive media monitoring, which is most effective when the strategies are based on children’s developmentally induced needs and experiences. For example, even in infancy, children differ greatly in their responses to media. A boy who develops a fascination with an aggressive media hero and imitates him all day, sometimes dangerously so, will likely require closer monitoring than a boy who shows no interest in those kinds of media heroes. Effective proactive media monitoring occurs when parents establish strategies for their children’s media use, are aware of their children’s media consumption, are willing to reflect on their children’s needs and experiences, and are willing, if needed, to update and alter their strategies to best map them onto their child’s needs and experiences. It likely comes as little surprise that both general proactive monitoring and proactive media monitoring occur in authoritative families more often than in other types of families.20
Restrictive and Active Proactive Media Monitoring
There are two kinds of proactive media monitoring: restrictive and active. Restrictive monitoring can occur in several ways. Parents can restrict certain types of media content (“You can play Minecraft, but not Grand Theft Auto”), the time children spend on various media (“no more than one hour of gaming”), or the place of media in the family (“no computer in the bedroom”). These kinds of limits are classified as restrictive monitoring. Restrictive monitoring of media use is an essential part of parenting. Media are like a large bag of potato chips to children; they eat all of them unless their parents prevent it.
Research indicates that restrictive media monitoring is not always effective. In general, it seems to work better with younger children than older children. In fact, it can be so counterproductive with teens that they will show reactance against any recommendations that they consider to be interfering with their autonomy. For example, if a parent forbids them to interact on social media, their reactance may drive them to show more instead of less risky behavior on the Internet. That said, certain strategies (discussed later in this chapter) can increase the effectiveness of restrictive monitoring, even with teens.
Active monitoring is different from restrictive monitoring. Active monitoring is understood as communication from parents before, during, or after their children’s media use that has the aim of reinforcing or weakening media’s potential effects. Active monitoring is most typically characterized as factual or evaluative. Factual monitoring involves all communication geared to increasing children’s critical media skills, such as supplying additional information about production techniques (for example, camera work or special effects) or explaining that the violence, advertising promises, or pornography in the media does not match reality. Evaluative active monitoring, on the other hand, refers to parents’ attempts to reinforce or weaken media
influence by communicating their own opinions or judgments about media content or issues. In this way, parents try to counterbalance the undesirable standards and values in the media with which their children are confronted.21
The effectiveness of active monitoring has been demonstrated in several studies. It can make children less susceptible to the influence of media violence. It can also increase learning from educational media, lead to more positive attitudes toward minority groups, and increase children’s interest in the arts and culture.22 In addition, active monitoring reduces the probability of teens showing risk behavior online and visiting sites that promote drug use.23
When Child Development and Proactive Media Monitoring Meet
As has been noted throughout this book, age is one of the strongest predictors of children’s media use and the subsequent effects of media on children. Very young children exhibit preferences for media different from those of their teen counterparts, and as we have highlighted, each group is affected quite differently by media. It is logical, then, for age to influence the issues that parents experience when it comes to media monitoring.
In the remainder of this chapter, we highlight three issues that are relevant for parenting children in three age groups. These issues serve as exemplars for other potential issues that parents face throughout childhood and adolescence. We first discuss the literature on whether parents should allow their babies and toddlers to look at screens at all. Second, at around five, some children, especially boys, acquire an interest in violent media, and we discuss how parents can mitigate or nullify potential negative effects of media violence. Finally, we discuss the literature on effective strategies for managing teens’ media use, particularly their smartphone use.
Babies, Toddlers, and Screen Time
Babies and toddlers differ considerably in their interest in screen media. Some are not drawn to them at all, while others cannot be torn away from them. Observational research has shown that the differences in their interest in television are huge. While playing with toys, some babies look at a television screen only twice in ten minutes, while others look no fewer than sixty-one times in the same ten minutes. And remarkably, these viewing patterns are quite stable. The same considerable differences between babies at six months are still observable at twelve and twenty-four months.24 It is clear that media use habits are formed at an early age.
In the last ten years, children under the age of two have dramatically increased the amount of time they spend with media.25 As discussed in chapters 4 and 11, this is due both to the emerging focus on the “diaper demographic” by commercial conglomerates and to an increased emphasis by parents on the importance of informal learning in early childhood. As a result of the frenzied attempts by marketers to reach ever-younger children in the front of a screen, parents have (understandably) felt increasingly unsure about whether and how much media content is okay for their littlest ones and what their media monitoring should look like. In the literature, parents’ intentional efforts to expose their children to media that are educational or (at least) attuned to their developmental level has been named foreground media exposure.
While we have seen a sizable growth in children’s foreground media exposure, in recent years increased attention has also been paid to children’s unintentional media exposure, often referred to as background media exposure. Background media exposure typically involves media content that is intended for adults but that children are exposed to simply by being in the room where others are watching it. This type of exposure seems to be particularly prevalent among very young children, possibly because parents (or older siblings) believe that very young children are unaffected by such content, assuming that it is mostly over their heads. Unfortunately, this supposition appears to be wrong. Background media exposure has been linked to several negative outcomes in young children, including lower sustained attention during playtime, lower-quality parent-child interactions, and weaker executive function.26 Considering that recent estimates suggest that American children under two are exposed to an average of 5.5 hours of background television per day, efforts to help parents manage background media use are certainly warranted.27
Media Guidelines of Pediatricians
Partly in response to these media-related issues pertaining to very young children, countries around the world have published guidelines to help parents manage media for infants and toddlers. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) was among the first, issuing in 1999 a policy statement cautioning parents against allowing any media use for children under the age of two.28 Following this recommendation, which the AAP republished in 2011, several other countries, including Australia, France, and the Netherlands, clamped down on screen use by young children. Yet these recommendations seem to have had little effect. As noted earlier, in many countries, the very youngest viewers have experienced increases—not decreases—in media exposure.29
Why would the AAP and others have such strict guidelines for children under two? Initially, the AAP and others argued that exposing very young children to media, even educationally oriented foreground media, would result in their experiencing fewer beneficial activities such as playing outside, reading, and imaginary play. This perspective was bolstered, in part, by two studies—one in 2004 by the pediatrician Dimitri Christakis and colleagues, and one in 2007 by Frederick Zimmerman and colleagues. These studies indicated that watching television in toddlerhood and early childhood resulted in delayed language development and in attention problems.30 With these findings in hand, along with research that demonstrated that infants learn better from humans than media (the video deficit; see chapter 11), it is understandable why such cautious recommendations emerged.
Unsurprisingly, the studies by Christakis and Zimmerman stirred up worldwide debate. Perhaps because of this extensive attention, both studies were reanalyzed by other researchers after publication—a phenomenon that seems to be increasing in the social sciences. In one reanalysis, the correlation between television viewing and attention problems found by Christakis and colleagues was significant only in young children who watched seven or more hours of television a day.31 In other words, the relationship held for only an exceptional group of children.
Similarly, the results found by Zimmerman and colleagues regarding children’s language development could not be replicated. In fact, a reanalysis by other researchers detected a nonsignificant correlation (that is, no relationship) between watching baby videos or DVDs (such as Baby Einstein) and language development, and a positive relationship between watching educational media (such as Sesame Street) and language development.32 As discussed in chapter 11, this latter result is in line with a multitude of studies showing that educational media can stimulate children’s cognitive and social-emotional development.
Time to Rethink Media Guidelines?
Is it time to rethink the AAP’s recommendations on screen use by young children? On the one hand, there is relatively robust evidence of the undesirable effects of background media use on very young children, which underscores the AAP recommendations. On the other hand, both key studies on the use of foreground media that influenced the AAP’s initial media recommendations have been largely overturned. Moreover, as discussed in chapter 11, there is robust evidence for the beneficial effects of educational foreground media on children’s cognitive and social-emotional development. And as also discussed in chapter 11, increasing evidence suggests that the video deficit can be reduced or nullified through parental scaffolding and certain program characteristics, such as repetition and familiar media characters. Finally, these encouraging results go together with an overwhelming array of educational touch-screen apps for children under two, many of whose designs have the potential to reduce the video deficit.
Christakis, the lead author of some of the research that inspired the AAP statement (and a member of the AAP commission that drafted the statement) believes it is time to reconsider the guidelines. In an opinion piece in JAMA Pediatrics, he stated that the
1999 AAP policy statement could not have taken into account the development of apps for tablets, which have been on the market only since 2010. According to Christakis, educational apps are more comparable to construction toys like blocks than to the passive activity of watching television or DVDs. In his opinion piece, Christakis noted that a child will never say, “I can do it!” while watching television, but will do so while playing with edu-apps.33 Moreover, he notes that touch-screen educational apps have several important characteristics that can promote, rather than suppress, child development. Table 14.1 lists some of these characteristics of educational apps.
Based on this analysis, Christakis now believes that “the judicious use of interactive media is acceptable for children younger than the age of two years.”34 Furthermore, based on the sleep-wake cycles of children under two, he advises a maximum screen time of thirty to sixty minutes a day. Interestingly, in the fall of 2015, one year after Christakis’s opinion piece appeared, the AAP announced that it was in the process of revising its guidelines for children and screens. The AAP now recognizes that not all screen time before age two is detrimental for child development. It is likely that the revised guidelines will make a distinction between educational and developmentally appropriate foreground media use, on the one hand, and developmentally inappropriate and background media use on the other hand.
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