Impact of Television and other Media on Children’s Development Marilyn B. Benoit, MD Definition of Media: Television, Computer Games, Internet, Music Videos & Songs, Video Games. Introduction The debate over nature vs. nurture has come to an end with the research findings that show the undeniable influence of environmental factors on development.� The Decade of the Brain brought us great advances. In fifty years we have gone from Erikson’s Childhood and Society to the Institute of Medicine’s Neurons to Neighborhoods. We now know that the brain has a dynamic relationship with its environment.� The brain influences how the person interacts with his environment while the environment �modifies the architecture of the brain. Early childhood development research has demonstrated that active environmental stimulation is necessary in the infant and preschool years in order to set the course for optimal brain development, regardless of the inherited intelligence potential.� Environment and the Brain Maria Montesorri and Piaget both recognized the impact of environment on brain development. Montesorri spoke about the environment as providing the building blocks for the “mental flesh” of the brain. Piaget used the term schemata to refer to the internal representations that are the brain’s recognition system that allows a child to relate to the familiar and move to understanding the unfamiliar experiences in his world.� Neuroscience literature describes “neural networks” (essentially webs of interconnecting nerve fibers) in the brain which really seems compatible with Piaget’s schemata. The neuroscience mantra “neurons that fire together wire together” is one that helps us to understand the concept of associative memory, and why it is that the more sensory systems that are recruited in an activity the more reinforced the memory for that event is. From the trauma literature we have learned that painful events (both physically and psychologically) can result in memory impairments and long lasting structural brain changes. Pleasurable events, on the other hand, are more reinforced in the memory system. The environment provides the stimulation through its content and context, accesses the brain via the sensory systems, and learning and behavior are reinforced if the experience is gratifying, and the more immediate and repetitive the gratification the stronger the reinforcement.� The take home message here is that the environment matters. Health Status Influences The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDCP) have reported that the health status of any population is influenced by a number of variables. Genetics account for 20% influence on health status and the environment surprisingly shares an equal 20% impact. The most significant information revealed, however, was the whopping 50% influence of the population’s “health behaviors” on its health status. For those who argue that we must continue to spend increasingly more dollars on access to health care, the disappointing finding was that health status is only influenced 10% by access to care! I provide this information because I think that it is very important to understand the reality of health care versus the economics of health care. It is also important to acknowledge that in the United States the single most powerful influential variable is its political economy. By that I mean that it is both a democracy and a capitalist country.� The democratic constitution guards the right to free speech and expression. Capitalism values the entrepreneurial individual and the economically successful corporate world. � Children and the Media What does the above have to do with children and the media? The world of the media has become very present in the lives of our children. The unrestrained media is a major revenue vehicle for corporate America. The media include television, the computer and Internet, video games and music videos, compact discs and music. While the print medium is also available, indicators are that children are using this medium less and less.� If we consider the CDCP category of “health behaviors” and consider how media impact our children’s “health behaviors,” we can list a number of ways in which the impact could have negative consequences. �But it is important first to describe what personal skills and behaviors children need to promote their functioning in society. They need to have a sense of mastery and competence. In order to achieve that, they need most of all to acquire self-regulation. By this I mean the ability to manage their mood states, their anxieties, their longings, their impulsivity and their general behavior. They need to develop the capacity to self soothe in the face of disappointment. They need to develop frustration tolerance and manage delay of gratification. They need to operate within a community context in which they are successful in getting along with others. Children need to develop a motivational system that moves them in a prosocial direction and enhances adaptive functioning. It’s what Daniel Goleman refers to as emotional intelligence. They are not born with these skills. Regardless of their biological endowment, regardless of their socioeconomic status and their racial or ethnic backgrounds, the environment plays a significant role in their eventual outcomes. Here are some Media facts reported by the National Institute on Media and the Family and the Kaiser Family Foundation:
These media have an impact on children’s learning, behavior, their affective or feeling states, their physiological arousal and attention, their expectations, their motivation, their aggression, their choices as consumers, their interpersonal relationships, their health status, their sleeping behaviors, their sexual behavior, their drug, alcohol and tobacco use and on their pro-social versus antisocial development. There is no doubt that television, computers, videos and the internet have all contributed to dissemination of important information, and will continue to be all mainstream vehicles of communication. �Villifying the media is not the intent of this article. Rather, it is important for society to do whatever possible to maximize the positive effects of the media on our children’s development. However, as with the print medium, these media can all be used in negative ways. As we can have pornography in print, so too it comes on TV, in videos and on the Internet. The problem is that we are operating in a culture where rapid and global dissemination is possible, and in the United States, in a free market economy where the advertising industry dominates all forms of media with “direct to consumer marketing.”�� In the United States, children of all ages are less supervised, and the media industry has resisted making any significant changes that would be protective of children and youth.� The multimedia environment of sight and sound, combined with being sedentary for long periods of time while eating high fat, high calorie, low nutritious foods and drinks which are pleasurable, creates a powerful and pleasurable learning experience for our children. But are they learning what we wish they would? Schools cannot compete with such an experience and I often wonder if our children’s common complaint of being bored is not related to the “entertainment factor” so ever-present in the media. I visited one child’s school to observe him, and I was over-stimulated by all the visuals in the classroom. The children meanwhile were working on their spelling using computers where the words were speeding past them and they had to recognize the correctly spelt word. I thought to myself that maybe it is now necessary for this generation of children who are been raised on Playstations� X-Boxes �, and Gameboys � to have such tools for learning. I did question what effect the removal of the teacher from the learning equation may have on other factors such as the seeking of approval within an attachment relationship that has emotional meaning to the child. Young children learn best within the context of a nurturing relationship with a significant adult. Could we be imposing technology upon them too soon? My grandniece recently started first grade. I asked her what she was looking forward to learning in first grade, and her rapid and spontaneous response was “technology.” Obviously, this was promoted as the highlight of the coming academic year! Steve Toomey, a cartoonist, captured the lure of the Internet with his Washington Post cartoon in which he portrayed a very young angry boy leaving the family dinner table pouting and saying “Well, I will just go and talk to my chat room family!” Individual and Familial Factors that affect Media’s Influence The extent of the media’s impact on any given child’s development will vary depending on a variety of factors. These factors are the traits of individual child such as temperament, resilience, psychological vulnerabilities, and overall developmental level. The family context plays a significant role in how children will perceive, interpret and respond to the media. It used to be that parents had the singular role of being the protective barrier between the outside world and their children. In the early days of television when a family had a single television and the number of shows was limited, parents could still manage to control their children’s exposure to what came into the home. The family’s own “baseline” functioning sets the stage for how media are used within the family environment. Are they used for education about life events or specific topics? Are the media used to “keep children quiet” and out of parents’ way? Are they used to minimize interaction between and among the family members? Do children have their own entertainment centers in their bedrooms? Research shows that time spent viewing media takes away from reading and spending time outside playing. The media, through its scenarios, stereotypes, and role models can influence how children develop empathy, manage conflictual situations, attempt to negotiate and compromise, their sensitivities to others, and how well they embrace diversity in our human family. Further Indirect Consequences of Children’s Involvement with the Media Already, in the United States there is what is approaching an epidemic of obesity in children with the consequences of type II diabetes in younger and younger populations, hypercholesterolemia in youngsters and poor physical health secondary to lack of exercise. On a recent visit to my native land, Trinidad, which models its children’s media experience after the United States, I was disturbed by the fact that playgrounds, tennis courts and swimming pools went unused while children were at home playing video games, viewing television or “hanging out” on the Internet. �One young lady whose use of the Internet I thought excessive told me “I don’t read books,” when I asked if she might be interested in going to the public library. Of course, that type of sedentary existence cannot lead to healthy physical development. In addition, the social isolation that ensues does not make for the development of an appropriate community within which children learn to share, take others’ feelings and thoughts into consideration, and learn to negotiate and compromise for the good of all, rather than maintain a selfish, self-indulgent perspective. Living in a world of immediately responsive media also means that children are seldom challenged with having to delay gratification. �The media gives unconditional and immediate gratification. How does a child ever develop patience and frustration tolerance in such an environment? Media and Violence Much has been written about the influence of the media on the expression of violence in children. When even the news no longer edits out horrific scenes of violence, and the video games and movies that our children see regularly contain explicit scenes of violence, it is no wonder that in the United States we are witnessing unacceptable violence among teenagers, and now even in the elementary schools. Parents are beginning to complain that they are seeing an increase in aggression in the preschoolers. Excessive viewing of violent content has been shown to raise anxiety, cause a numbing of one’s response to violence and its consequences, and increased aggression. Conclusion In spite of valiant efforts to seek governmental interventions into the nature of the content of videos, video games, family time television shows, and more recently on some Internet material, it is virtually impossible to get the desired federal regulation because of the first amendment of the United States Constitution: the right to free speech. That democratic right, combined with the fact that violence sells, means that the media conglomerates will always win out. It is therefore incumbent upon parents to take on the primary responsibility of trying their very best to control how the media is used within their homes. The American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry both recommend that children not have televisions in their bedrooms, that parents regulate how much time children of different development stages spend viewing the media, and monitor what their children watch, as well as the video games and Internet experiences to which their children are exposed. Meanwhile, as recommended by the Kaiser Family Foundation, there needs to be ongoing longitudinal research which poses specific questions concerning the impacts of various media on children’s development in the cognitive, social, emotional and behavioral domains of functioning. Suggested Readings
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