Should You Watch TV With Your Child? – Amy Franzini (Transcript)

These are now almost obsolete. Even 10 years ago, I would need to proactively program my DVR or purchase entire series on a DVD.

Today, I can find an entire plethora of programming on Netflix, Disney+, Paramount+, Max, Hulu, Prime, Apple TV. On all these streaming services, I can find programs that are available currently and programs that I watched when I was a child. And as easy as it is for me as a researcher to access these programs to analyze, it’s just as easy for today’s children, tweens, and teens.

The Impact of Media Accessibility

It’s no surprise that this is worrying and concerning to parents. Parents are worried that their children are going to be exposed to content that’s harmful or encourages bad behavior. For example, let me describe an episode of a program currently airing on Peacock. The main character, a 7-year-old boy, has a babysitter come to his house while his parents go out to the movies.

But he sneaks out and goes to the movies himself. Now, this isn’t behavior we want our children modeling, is it? Especially a 7-year-old. But while we can see this show on Peacock today, it originally aired in 1959. That 7-year-old’s name was Dennis the Menace. I use this example to make a point: Media has always been a concern for parents.

Parents want the best for their children. But it’s not just that. From the time a child is born, their primary caregivers are their main source of social modeling. Once they go to school, peers are added into the mix.

And from the time they start consuming media, it plays a role in socialization as well. Parents no longer have sole control, and that can be scary and unsettling. In addition, parents are receiving messages about the harms of media from many different sources. They’ll hear about it from their peers and parents.

The Role of Media in Parenting

They’ll read about it or hear about it from their kids’ teachers or their children’s doctors. And they’ll hear about it from the media itself. Parents are afraid of screwing up and making a lifelong impact on their children. But as a media researcher and a parent, I suggest that we need to relax and remember that, like anything that’s human-created, television is a tool.

And like any tool, it can be used for good and evil and all that lies in between. In fact, television can be a powerful partner for parents to help their kids figure out who they are and what they want to become. Before I continue, let me acknowledge that caregivers’ concerns are valid. As I just said, they’re receiving messages from multiple camps.

Their parents will regale them from tales from back in their day, and fellow caregivers might tell them that, “Oh, I don’t let my kid watch that on television.” The media itself will provide accounts of the risks of media in parenting magazines, websites, blogs, and on social media. In these media accounts, they might reference media research that reports correlations or connections between watching media and certain behaviors. It needs to be understood in context.

I’m not suggesting that we let our children watch TV all day every day, but I am suggesting that we use television as a tool to help us as parents. As I mentioned, parents have had the same concern for generations, which connects to our fear of things we can’t control. Research offers us some control. A 2018 study that was published in The Lancet found that children aged 8 to 11 who watched more than the recommended screen time of two hours a day also scored lower on cognitive assessments.

Understanding Media Consumption and Its Effects

As a parent, we might think, “Okay, if I don’t let my kid watch more than two hours a day of television, they’re not going to have any cognitive issues.” That’s not necessarily true. While there are many studies like this that focus on the quantity of children’s television, there are fewer that focus on the quality of it. Many of the studies that do focus on the quality of children’s television look at what’s called prosocial media or behaviors that help others, with the quintessential example being Sesame Street.

Many of these studies will look at the relationship between watching prosocial programs and exhibiting prosocial behaviors. So if my child watches Sesame Street, are they more likely to share with another child? But it’s really hard to find true causal relationships between the media and behaviors, both good and bad.

Now, I’m simplifying a semester’s worth of research methods here, but in order to show a true cause and effect relationship, we need to show that the thing that we think is causing the behavior, in this case television, was the only thing that could be causing that behavior, and that behavior wasn’t there before television was introduced.

The Complexity of Media Influence

So you can imagine how hard that could be to do with television. Now, don’t get me wrong. I am in no way saying that television does not influence children’s values and behaviors. Of course it does. If today’s children are surrounded by media, media peers and parents are influential in socialization of children, and peers and parents are also surrounded by media. So it’s omnipresent in our children’s lives.

So I suggest that we need to really focus on the quality of media rather than simply the quantity. I’m using the term quality loosely here. Quality doesn’t mean that we need to be watching all PBS or National Geographic shows. Rather, what might television shows be offering to our children? What might they be teaching them about the world, about others, about themselves? Like research, theories can help us to understand what’s going on with the media.

There are certain theories that focus on how active or not active children and really all of us are in our media use and what we might get out of the media. One such theory is called uses and gratifications theory by Katz and Blumler. They suggest that we use media to get something out of it. The four categories that these uses and gratifications fall under are diversion, personal relationships, personal identity, and surveillance.

Engaging with Media: Uses and Gratifications

Surveillance connects to our need to know what’s going on in the world. An example of diversion might be if a child is feeling stressed out at school and they come home and they watch a superhero cartoon to escape. For personal relationships, children might use certain programs as social capital to talk to other children about, or they may form what’s called parasocial relationships. Parasocial relationships are these one-sided relationships with characters, celebrities, sports figures, and influencers.

They’re relatively risk-free because the other person doesn’t know that you exist, but they still form a connection. A current example for this would be Taylor Swift fans. Taylor Swift fans obviously feel connected to each other, and they also feel connected to Taylor even though she doesn’t know that they exist. For personal identity, this use and gratification would address if somebody felt an identification with a character or an aspiration towards that character.

If we use Taylor Swift again, not only do they feel connected to Taylor, but they might want to be like her when they grow older. My most recent research has focused on this personal identity idea. I had been exploring tween television programs and noticed that a lot of these programs featured characters that were leading secret lives or double identities. So I analyzed 11 of these programs to see what was going on.

Television and Tween Identity Exploration

These programs featured characters who were leading double lives as witches, wizards, superheroes, pop stars, villains, and spies. At first glance, it might seem like these programs were popular with tweens because of these roles. What tween hasn’t pretended that they were a witch or wizard or superhero or pop star or felt like they were a villain or a spy at one point in their life? But as I looked deeper, I found that there was more going on.

All these characters were dealing with the idea of living with a secret identity. In order to explore this even further, I did a deep dive into some child development theories to see what was going on at this particular time in children’s lives. The first theory that I looked at was a theory called Possible Selves by Markus and Nurius. This theory explores how children might be looking at or exploring their possible self, which looks at not only what they fear they might become or what they want to become, but also what they might become.

So this seemed to click with my idea of these secret lives and double identities. But what I found was that even long-established theories of child development, such as Piaget’s stages of cognitive development or Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development, all dealt with issues that children were dealing with at this time in this stage of life. This stage in life was such an interesting time when children are moving from childhood into adolescence, and these shows mirrored a lot of what was going on. Issues of figuring out power and morality, building and maintaining friendships, initial explorations into romantic relationships, family relationships, and of course, the one that dealt with this idea the most, finding and revealing one’s true self.

The Reflective Nature of Tween Programming

Let me share an example from just one of the programs that I looked at, Villains of Valleyview. This program originally debuted in the summer of 2022, and it features a family of villains who had to leave their lives as villains and assimilate into the town of Valleyview.

Now, most episodes would feature the comedic situations that this type of situation would present, but when looked at as a whole, there was a lot more going on. The characters were figuring out issues of morality, what’s right, what’s wrong, building friendships, and connecting as a family.

And it’s not like all of a sudden the characters were good. And isn’t that what adolescence is like? Learning values from our parents and seeing how that plays out with our peers, trying, messing up, and trying again? And this was just one of the 11 programs that I looked at.

I explored some of these main issues that people were dealing with at this specific time in life, finding issues of power and maintaining relationships with family and friends. The more I looked at these programs, the more I was struck by the opportunity to use these programs as a tool for parents to help our children as we figure out who they are and who they want to become. I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of co-viewing or joint media engagement.

The Value of Co-Viewing and Joint Media Engagement

Joint media engagement is just a fancy way of saying watching TV together. And research shows that the more that we watch together, the more meaningful that content will be. I can share my own anecdotal experience co-viewing. So my co-viewing in the past 20 years as a parent has ranged from watching Sesame Street and Blue’s Clues with my oldest son when he was a toddler to watching Marvel shows with him today. And in between these bookends of programs are multiple sports programs that we watched with both my sons, but many programs that I watched together with my entire family, such as Modern Family, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and most recently, Only Murders in the Building.

Sometimes the takeaways from these co-viewings are something really tangible, like when my kids were little and they watched Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood on PBS Kids. And when we would cross the street, they might quote Daniel Tiger’s mom to say we need to stop and listen to stay safe. Or it could be something just casual, like when I watch iCarly with my nine-year-old daughter and talk about situations that some of the characters are going to be put into. These tasks are short and casual, but still impactful.

But for the most part, much of my co-viewing and joint media engagement with my family was and is just simply being together and enjoying laughter. And that’s the memory that I want my children to have and that I cherish. My exploration into double lives and secret identities is just one type of trope on one type of program targeted to one type of audience. But it suggests that if we intentionally watch shows together, we can use this as a growth tool rather than fearing television as something dangerous.

Conclusion: Embracing Television as a Parenting Tool

Caregivers, let’s treat television as our partner rather than fearing it as the enemy. If we can use this incredible tool to our advantage, we should use this tool to help us to create a culture of connection and exploration with our children. Thanks so much for listening.

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