The way it once was...?

The family sitting around the television, watching together, is practically an American icon.  In this millennium, however, that image is almost non-existent.  Why? For one, the options for viewing have dramatically increased.  No longer are kids relegated to Saturday morning viewing – we live in a world where there is something available for anyone 24/7, be it all-children’s programming channels or on-demand options. Secondly, ways to access programming has changed. We can access shows on computers and hand-held devices.  Many children under 10 cannot even fathom a world where a video screen isn’t available in the backseat of a car.  All these screens and ways of watching has turned television and video watching into less of a family activity, and more of a solo event.

This is a blog about parent-child co-viewing of television and other technologies.  I focus mostly on TV because that medium continues to be the biggest influence among young viewers.  However, I bring up other forms of media (such as video-games, computer software, websites and hand-held devices), because those types of technologies can be shared among generations, too. This blog is intended for parents, teachers, creators, producers, researchers, and anyone else who takes a general interest in children using media.

First Lady Michelle Obama teaches Elmo about healthy foods.

I began my interest in co-viewing when I had the pleasure of spending a year on a research fellowship at Sesame Workshop.  It’s true that those Sesame Street writers are so good at being funny!  They often create puns on words and parodies of current TV and movie hits. (Has anyone seen Sesame Street’s “Mad Men” version – teaching children about emotions? It’s one of myfavorite things these days.)  Sesame Street is also famous for getting the hottest celebrity guests, including actors, comedians, sports stars, and several First Ladies.  It occurred to me that the 3-to-5-year-old audience didn’t necessarily understand the cultural humor or the impact of those famous guests, so I began investigating why the most-researched preschool show would include aspects that were not meant for children. As it turns out, Sesame Street has always intended to keep adults in the room. Since the show’s inception in 1969, the humor has been there for the grown-ups to co-view, with the idea that an adult in the room can scaffold the learning.

This philosophy is reflected in the writings of Gerald Lesser (1974), who has documented the creation of Sesame Street:

“No single set of television programs, or any other single educational approach, can be expected to produce a substantial effect by itself, unless the experiences are tied to other aspects of the child’s life.  Whenever a parent or an older sibling talks with the young child about what they have seen or done together and encourages him to elaborate upon the experience, a multiplier effect is set into motion.  Even just keeping a young child company while he watches a television program probably has its own reinforcing properties, since it represents a rather uncommon sign of crediting his activities by the parent or older sibling.”

This notion of having an adult in the room to elaborate and encourage the child to participate is very much in line with constructivist thinking.  Vygotsky’s (1978) Zone of Proximal Development theory encourages this kind of scaffolding, where the adult offers aid to the child and then tapers off the help when the child no longer needs it (much like removing the scaffolding of a building during construction).  Whitehurst and his colleagues (Whitehurst, et al., 1994; Whitehurst, et al., 1988) pioneered a kind of intervention for reading picture books to children called Dialogic Reading that involved this scaffolding idea.  Because of Dialogic Reading’s great success, I followed the notions behind it to create my own intervention for co-viewing video, which I call Dialogic Viewing.  This intervention was the basis for my doctoral dissertation.

Of course, the landscape of children’s television has changed immensely since Sesame Street began over forty years ago.  Now there are literally dozens of programs aimed at young children, many of which are highly entertaining and very educational.  What was once a “vast wasteland” in the 1960’s (to quote Newton Minow), is now almost overwhelming with quality choices.  But television is not the only medium children use; kids encounter all kinds of screens today, including computer, gaming, and mobile technologies.  For each medium, the learning and enjoyment can be greatly increased by adult-child co-viewing. While I truly believe that technology such as TV, video, computer games and handheld applications do have the ability to teach kids, I also believe that the learning can be enhanced tremendously with adult or peer intervention.

This blog was created as an outlet for me.  I realized that I already track developments in media and technology that enhance co-viewing; this blog simply serves as an way for me to share this information.  Parents, teachers, researchers, media creators and producers often ask me what I think about co-viewing. Well, here it is! Enjoy.

Lesser, G. S. (1974). Children and television: Lessons from Sesame Street. New York: Random House.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Whitehurst, G. J., Arnold, D. S., Epstein, J. N., Angell, A. L., Smith, M., & Fischel, J. E. (1994). A picture book reading intervention in day-care and home for children from low-income families. Developmental Psychology, 30, 679-689.

Whitehurst, G. J., Falco, F. L., Lonigan, C. J., Fischel, J. E., DeBaryshe, B. D., Valdez-Menchaca, M. C., et al. (1988). Accelerating language development through picture book reading. Developmental Psychology, 24(4), 552-559.