Recent research has indicated that there are long-term consequences of early media exposure. This study examined the amount, content and context of television exposure across the infancy period in the USA. Parents of 308 infants aged 6-18 months completed questionnaires detailing parental attitudes regarding their children's television use and…

This study examines parents' and children's reaction to the American Academy of Pediatrics recommendation to limit children's television (TV) viewing to 2 hours a day or less. To better understand the challenges faced by parents who would seek to adhere to the guidelines, we conducted qualitative small group interviews with 60 parent/child dyads…

In 1966 a group of friends gathered for a dinner party in Manhattan. As the evening was winding down, one of the guests, Lloyd N. Morrisett, a vice president at the Carnegie Corporation, turned to his host, a television executive named Joan Ganz Cooney, and asked a seemingly innocuous question: Can television educate young children? Unknown to…

This paper describes a multi-media outreach campaign intended to increase children's knowledge of engineering and to improve the public image of the profession. The central element is a reality-based show entitled "Design Squad," whose first season was broadcast on public television stations beginning in the spring of 2007. The show was…

For some time now, questions have been asked about the impact of television and video materials on the cognitive and social development of preschoolers and older children. More recently, these same questions have been asked in relation to the extensive exposure to these media that infants and toddlers are currently experiencing. To answer these…

Television viewing has been linked to the increasing problem of obesity in young children, as well as to the development of inappropriate eating behaviours, yet the mechanism behind this link remains unclear. This study investigated the messages about food and eating that appear in a sample of preschool children's television shows and found that…

Empowering children for a critical and judicious use and consumption of media is a main objective of media literacy. This paper aims to examine the range of television programs available for children in Portugal through a comparative analysis of the programming for children broadcast by the four Portuguese terrestrial channels (RTP1, RTP2, SIC and…

Exposure to different forms of narrative media may influence children's development of theory-of-mind. Because engagement with fictional narratives provides one with information about the social world, and possibly draws upon theory-of-mind processes during comprehension, exposure to storybooks, movies, and television may influence theory-of-mind…

Television captioning has great potential to provide deaf children with access to the audio track of programmes. However, use of captions may be limited by the lower English literacy skills of the deaf population compared to the general population. Here, we investigate how the rate of caption delivery affects the comprehension of educational…

Children seem to naturally gravitate to particular interests, be it sports, the arts, or any of a myriad of other pursuits. Their area of interest seems an integral part of who they are so that they seem to have been "born that way." Even when a child is challenged--physically, cognitively, behaviorally, emotionally--their essence still seems to…

A commonly accepted belief is that the violence depicted in television programs, particularly cartoons, has a negative impact on young children's behavior. However, young children may be less inclined to emulate violent actions seen on television than currently thought. Research indicates that young children have limited comprehension of…

Television viewing among young children has been an on going issue as it is found to effect their development in various areas. This problem is getting more worrisome as the percentage and amount of hours of television exposure among young children is increasing, especially with the growing production of children television programs. Studies have…

Research on children's television suggests that preschool programs can facilitate literacy and language development. In 1998 Whitehurst and Lonigan described two interdependent sets of skills involved in literacy acquisition: "outside-in" or oral language skills and "inside-out" or code-related skills. Outside-in skills support children's…

Synthesizing cutting-edge research from multiple disciplines, this book explores how young children acquire knowledge in the "real world" and describes practical applications for early childhood classrooms. The breadth and depth of a child's knowledge base are important predictors of later literacy development and academic achievement. Leading…

The purpose of this paper is to examine the predictors of children's media use in the USA, comparing cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses. Data come from Waves 1 and 2 of the Child Development Supplement (CDS-I; CDS-II), a nationally representative sample of American children aged 0-12 in 1997 and 5-18 in 2002. Twenty-four hour time use…