Reading summary for Child development in Media

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Children and Media: A Global Perspective, First Edition. Dafna Lemish. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Companion Website: www.wiley.com/go/lemish/childrenandmedia

Media and Children at Home

Media use, particularly for younger children, occurs to a large extent within the home, in a family context. It is so familiar that it is one of those areas of our life that we take “for granted,” as part of everyday routine. Consequently, it is impossible to separate the study of children and media from the context within which it occurs (be it the physical conditions – the kind of media available at home and their location) or the social conditions within which media are used in the midst of engagement in other activities and in the presence of other family members. Further, media use is not necessarily an individual act of choice, but often a result of adjustment, negotiation, collaborations, compromises, and/or imitation of others in the child’s environment. What does viewing a particular program or playing a particular video game mean in such a rich context? Is it an active choice on the part of the child to watch television, surf the net, or read a magazine from among all the other activities available at a particular moment? Even mobile media used outside of the home can often be regarded as an extension of the larger context of family and home, as a symbolic “umbilical cord” by which parental control and/or child dependency are negotiated.1

Clearly, the growing centrality of home-based media use is culturally dependent. Indeed, many socio‒cultural differences may interact to create varied forms and amounts of media use, such as longer or shorter numbers of school hours, warm versus cold weather, safe or dangerous neighborhoods, active social life, child labor, daily chores, availability of media infrastructure, income, and education, which all play a significant role in shaping the centrality media have for children. The larger context of modern family life, too, should be understood. By-products of the transition to a more modernized lifestyle have been, on one hand, the creation of family leisure time and, on the other hand, the growing emphasis on the home as a center of indoor

Lemish, D. (2015). Children and media : A global perspective. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from sfsu on 2020-11-30 09:31:34.

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life. The home can be a fertile ground for the gradual growth of the central role media have in family life, given growing urbanization and concern for personal safety in the streets together with exponential technological developments.

The Role of Context

Understanding children’s use of media in their everyday life is best analyzed as an interaction not only of individual, contextual, and social characteristics, but also of more general understanding of media as culturally situated.

Let us take, for example, a girl growing up in a society torn by a deep social conflict (such as between ethnic or religious groups) in which there is only one television station, which is owned and managed by the dominant social group. News programs in this country are a central solidifying mechanism that serves to convey a sense of nationality that is highly revered by most viewers of the dominant group. Family members, perhaps some neighbors and relatives as well, may gather around the television set on a regular basis to watch the news programs and argue over the content broadcast. In this particular social context, the girl internalizes an understanding that television has both essential and ideological values, more far reaching than the understanding she gets from watching her favorite cartoon or comedy as a leisure activity.

In comparison, a boy who grows up in a relatively homogenized society that has not experienced overt conflicts, with a multi-channel commercial television and computer in his room, in a culture in which viewing and surfing is regarded as a pass-the-time activity accompanied by a reward system (“No TV until you have done your homework and cleaned your room!”; “you’ll get that new video game if your grades improve”), may develop a very different attitude to media use, most likely as a leisure activity. Such cultural differences can be found not only between nations throughout major regions of the world, for example, Latin America in com- parison with South Asia, but even within smaller geographical areas that seemingly have a lot in common. For example, a study of European children conducted in the late 1990s found that children growing up in countries that, historically, have been relatively more permissive in parenting style, such as Italy and Sweden, had higher private ownership of televisions in children’s rooms, higher individual viewing and less parental mediation. In contrast, in France and Belgium, where parenting styles have been less permissive, television has been found to be a more integral part of the entire family’s leisure activities and viewing typically takes place in the presence of other family members. Thus, the contexts of television use and parental educational approaches seem to be part of a more complex and general pattern of cross-cultural differences including general attitudes toward the media, perceptions of the degree of privacy that should be granted children, division of space at home, and availability of additional media.2

Another social dimension of interest regarding media use has to do with diver- sities within each society itself, such as class or sexual differences. Unfortunately,

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15Media and Children at Home

much of the available research has been performed by – and on – middle-class populations, as these are the ones most familiar and accessible to most researchers operating within academic institutions worldwide. Therefore, studies conducted on other populations are of particular interest. For example, several studies of working-class families in Anglo-European countries found that beyond income, education, and occupational differences typical of such comparisons there were also significant class differences in many aspects of family lives, including their experiences in and approaches to child rearing, different roles parents assume in socialization of their children, and the like. Thus, while blue-collar families in the USA were found to emphasize conformity, obedience, and adoption of conservative values in their children’s education, middle-class families emphasized motivation, affect, creativity, and self-control. Such differences can have significant consequences for the role media occupy in the family, for example, in parental supervision, time schedules, ideologies regarding uses of time, and desire to limit or advance media use.3

Earlier research on television viewing and communication patterns in the family has distinguished between two central orientations – social and conceptual, with each family located on a continuum between low to high in orientation. Accordingly, families with high social orientation are characterized by encouraging their children to get along with other family members, to withhold as much as possible from engaging in confrontations, to depress anger, and to stay “out of trouble.” The impor- tance of preserving peace and quiet at home and avoiding hurting others’ feelings are central values in the socialization processes of children growing up in these families.

In contrast, families with a high concept orientation encourage an atmosphere of open communication, free expression of ideas and conceptual debates. Children in these families are exposed to different sides and perspectives on controversial issues and their parents encourage them to voice their opinions and to argue about them. The central emphasis in such families is on ideas, rather than on feelings.4

Interestingly, a family’s orientation was found, in the USA, to influence children’s viewing habits. As a general rule, socially oriented families viewed television more, but were lighter consumers of news and current affairs programs. They perceived television to be primarily an entertainment medium and means of producing family solidarity. In contrast, children from high concept-oriented families used television more as a source of keeping up-to-date with the news and much less for entertain- ment purposes. They were lighter television viewers, used it less for social purposes, and their parents were more involved in regulating their viewing behaviors.

Obviously, children who grow up in a variety of combinations of the two family orientations create varying types of communication patterns, including in the use of media. Thus media use habits and preferences are clearly not only an individual choice or personality trait, but are greatly affected by family characteristics.

In turn, the fact that families are also formed within a particular cultural setting must be taken into account. For example, in collectivist-oriented cultures, or those deeply divided by a conflict, where cooperation and conformity to the collective is more highly regarded and children are discouraged from expressing individuality and encouraged to fit in, we may expect social orientation families to be more of the

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norm and, as a result, stronger emphasis to be placed on the social roles of media. In contrast, valorization of academic achievement in children in several Asian countries, such as Korea and China, complicates mediation of media use, particu- larly computer and internet use. Hence, while these technologies are perceived as key to academic success, they are also deemed by parents to be time-consuming and frivolous forms of engagement.5

Another example that illustrates this argument comes from a comparative analysis of children and media in China and Australia. Differences in levels of moderniza- tion, social development, regulatory systems, and nationalism, among others, all make for variation in media flows and availabilities in both local content generation and families’ everyday media practices.

Thus, we cannot apply theoretical frameworks and empirical results from one region to another uncritically and non-reflexively.6 This is true not only across regions and countries, but also within them, as illustrated by comparisons between rural and urban children or along class, wealth, and gender divides.7

The analysis of another study, based on in-depth interviews with members of diverse families,8 found two typical patterns of media use in the USA: Middle- and upper-class families demonstrated an ethic of expressive empowerment according to which parents encourage media use that promote their children’s education and personal accomplishments. They respect their children’s need for independence and privacy, and trust their media-use related judgments. Interestingly, many of these children continue to use media (such as mobile phones) and maintain a strong tie to their parents as they physically expand their activities away from home, while their parents are afforded the possibility of surveillance over them and even the option of intervening in their lives (on social networks, for example). The researcher argued that such helicopter-parenthood contributes to a narcissistic environment of self-focus.

In contrast, lower-class families (including those whose life circumstances deprived them of middle-class privileges) were characterized by an ethic of respectful connectedness, in which parents encourage use of communication technologies in ways that maintain and respect the centrality of the family and parental authority. Given that, on the whole, children in the lower-class families have fewer options for structured activities outside of the home, they spend more time with other family members in close quarters and develop a stronger sharing orientation of resources and activities. Thus, family needs override individual ones in making media-related decisions. Here, too, the researcher noted that some children raised in such families rebel against the restrictive forms of parenthood, especially those with more advanced technological skills than their parents. Such children walk the thin line of combining approaches and so balance individual needs and personal empowerment with concern and consideration of collective needs, which is a complicated task.

Sociological research dealing with changes taking place in the modern family suggests that children’s media use increases in those cases in which they are left on their own for extended periods of time because both parents are working and are less able to supervise their children’s activities. This is also often the case for other familial contexts, such as single-parent, immigrant, or working class. Understandably,

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17Media and Children at Home

worrying about children’s media use may not be high on the list of concerns when parents are busy providing for their family’s basic needs and striving to survive daily difficulties. Even when parents wish to be more involved in their children’s media habits they are forced, increasingly, due to their work schedule, to handle such supervision via “remote control” ‒ leaving clear instructions for the children, placing them in the care of family members, employing caretakers and babysitters, or super- vising them via phone calls.

Thus, what seems to be clear from the research is that today’s families deal more than ever before with conflicting pressures regarding the permeation of communi- cation technologies in their children’s lives. In doing so, many encourage use of the media in order to offer their children the best opportunities possible, in the hope that media will assist them to solve problems and strengthen family connectedness. At the same time, they are anxious about the many threats they perceive media to have for their children’s wellbeing, and thus look for ways to supervise media use more closely. While they may hope media will ease their parenting tasks, and save them time and effort, in practice the exponential growth of technologies and options only raise expectations for more intense communication and supervision, incurring additional parental work.

Media Diffusion in the Family

The rapid diffusion of television reached saturation point in many places in the world toward the end of the twentieth century. For example, studies have found that 98 percent of US households owned at least one set and 65 percent owned more than one television in the 1990s. Changes in family structures, parenting styles, plus the need to juggle employment and child-rearing missions, all brought about changes at the turn of the century in terms of the place the medium of television played in family life.9

Some media critics do not necessarily look at the integration of television in the home as a positive development. They argue that it hurts the unity of family life because of its routine, regular, mechanistic, and ritualistic nature. This forces family members to stay in the same physical vicinity, controls their time together, and, so goes the argument, erases unique family activities such as games, rituals, and conversations.

This perspective assumes that joint viewing of television takes place randomly, without planning. But what about those family events where viewing is a pre- planned activity? What of the bonding of parents and children who view a romantic series together? Or the family members rooting for their favorite sports team? Or the nostalgic, cross-generational viewing of such programs as an old movie, a favorite comedy, a dramatic series, a special holiday event, or a political speech? In such cases, and many others, television has the potential of being as much a stimulator of family integration as it is a barrier.

Furthermore, this situation was complicated by the introduction of smaller, mobile, and better-quality television sets of the late 1960s that enticed middle- and

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upper-class families to purchase additional sets. This trend resulted in the growing number of children who watch television on their own, often in their bedrooms. Later, the introduction of cable television as well as remote-control devices strength- ened the trend of individual viewing. The internet accelerated these processes with the possibilities of downloading programs of one’s individual preference for content, schedule, and location. The result of this process is that the multi-channel, multi-device environment produced a situation in which there are very few programs that attract all family members to come together for joint viewing, beyond dramatic special media events and festive occasions.

While these trends are typical of the development of television viewing in Euro- American-oriented societies and the more economically affluent segments in and outside of them, they differ according to society, culture, as well as sub-cultures with lower income levels, dwelling conditions, and a more collective social orientation and value system.

One way or another, screen culture should be perceived as a central force world- wide in the complex social processes involving the many forms of family structures, values, and ways of functioning.

The advent of the internet and the widespread adoption of mobile media, with seemingly unlimited options for surfing, play, creative activity, and networking, have changed family integration around the central medium of television and offered a wide variety of possibilities for re-structuring a family’s use of time and space. Indeed, extensive research found that a vast majority of children and youth have online access in many industrialized societies. While data on internet availability are often a function of the method used to measure access and the point in time in which the studies were conducted, overall the findings indicate an exponential growth in internet access and use worldwide, despite differential patterns. For example, access is often facilitated in low-resource countries via mobile phones, due to the absence of terrestrial infrastruc- ture. Indeed, digital divides between the haves and have-nots across as well as within nations remain a major concern. One general form of categorizing patterns of current domestic media ecologies distinguishes between families that are “media-rich,” meaning they own both traditional as well as new media technologies; “media-poor,” who have very little ownership of media hardware; and “traditional,” where the family relies mainly on broadcast media and limited digital ones.10

Furthermore, access in and of itself is conflated with a host of variables related to privilege. Thus, the fact that a child has access to a computer and internet does not mean that she has the motivation to use it, the literacy skills involved in maximizing or employing meaningful usage, or the ability to benefit from it.

The Role of Media in the Fabric of Family Life

Consideration of the concept of domestication11 ‒ the process by which the medium becomes an integral part of everyday family life ‒ leads us to examine the processes of adoption and change in this family context: how does a medium – be it television,

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19Media and Children at Home

computer, game console, or mobile phone – fit within existing gender and age hierarchies (e.g., who owns it? where is it placed? who has access to it?) as well as within family relationships (e.g., its integration into everyday routines, negotiations of access and use, its place in family conversations and in parenting styles)? Overall, it appears that use of the internet and mobile media contribute to blurring external and internal family boundaries, including, for example, the flow of information in and out of the home, as well as blurring the boundaries of work, study, and leisure that happen within and outside the home.12

In addition, we can also ask: how do media facilitate the process of reaching out into the wider world that develops with maturation and accelerates during adoles- cence? For example, the adoption of mobile phones facilitates the dialectic process of “letting go” of children, which contributes to their developing into independent and resilient young people yet keeps parents tethered to them by way of concerns for their safety and growth as they experiment with independence.13 Similarly, children use media to negotiate this tension. For example, when Israeli‒Palestinian girls maintained their secretive use of mobile phones in exploring romantic relation- ships behind their parents’ backs.14 The medium, in this case, enabled the girls to penetrate through traditional family walls as they reached out to the wider world while physically restricted to their homes, thus negotiating the tension between rebellion and maintenance of cultural norms and expectations.

The rise in children’s private media ownership, including those technologies located, physically, in their bedrooms and mobile ones carried with them, so typical of middle- and upper-class children worldwide, present major challenges to parental supervision of media use. Many such media-related activities become private affairs (e.g., phone calls, texting, surfing) of which parents have very little knowledge or control.

In summary, studying media use in its natural habitat, in the home, is by no means a simple task and can involve use of multiple research approaches. Scholars do, of course, ask children – and their caregivers – about media use habits. We use surveys, conduct interviews by phone or face-to-face, and ask children to complete questionnaires in school settings. When we ask them to do so, they may (or may not) do their best to provide truthful and complete responses; they may (or may not) try to guess our intentions and provide what they perceive to be pleasing and socially acceptable responses; they may (or may not) be able to be reflective over their own media-related behaviors and those of other family members. We also use media ratings and marketing data provided by commercial and public companies in order to find out what children like to view, play with, surf and do, when, for how long, and with whom.

While information obtained in these studies provides us with very important data, we are still left with a very incomplete picture of what media use in the home as a routine everyday experience is “really” like for children and their families. To do so, we should probably be invisible investigators, living in the homes of children all over the world, for long stretches of time, and gaining a first-hand, non-intrusive experience with their lives.

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Although researchers cannot be invisible, some have been able to become participant-observers of family life over an extended period of time. These researchers have been able to integrate comfortably into the fabric of family routines and so attain first-hand understandings of members’ everyday lives, including their media uses. First introduced into the study of television in the 1970s, ethnographies of family lives have slowly gained a following among researchers. These efforts are still disproportionately time-consuming and limited in scope, yet extremely insightful and valuable. While reading the accounts and analyses provided by such studies, one stops to ponder: Is this the way things are happening in my family? Is this true for me as well? Do the issues that emerge resonate with my own reflections? Gained through ethnographic research, many of the findings reported below attempt to answer these questions.

The social uses of television

One of the major contributions of the early work that focused on television was the realization that the medium serves many more functions and roles than simply providing entertainment or information.15 The social uses of television are surprisingly diverse and can be generally divided into two groups ‒ structural and relational ‒ and applied to other media as well.

Structural uses of television are non-content related and have to do solely with aspects of medium use. For example, when television is used to provide background noise for routine household activities or to create a feeling that the house is “full” of people when a child is home alone. Originally, television also regulated much of a family’s daily schedule: it determined eating and bedtime hours and organized weekly routines. For example, a mother might encourage a resistant preschooler to take a nap with a tempting promise: “When you wake up from your nap, it will be time to watch your program”; or when a teen requests: “Let’s have an early dinner tonight so I can see the soccer match.” Running errands, or scheduling social appointments and outdoor activities were often affected, directly or indirectly, by the television schedule. This role of television has eroded in multi-device homes with recording capabilities enabling greater flexibility in terms of when favorite programs can be viewed. Yet viewing remains largely intact for special live events in which the experience of engagement in real time is valued highly. Examples are viewing a presidential address, news coverage of a disaster, a cultural or sporting event, or a holiday parade celebration.

Relational uses of television refer to the role of television in patterns of relation- ships between family members; for example, by facilitating communication between them. Thus, parents might refer to a television character or scene to illustrate experiences, emotions, or opinions in a discussion or disagreement with a son or daughter. Similarly, a familiar television episode can assist a child in gaining access to a conversation as it provides an equalizing and common point of reference to all participants.

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Applying social knowledge and behaviors directly acquired from everyday situations portrayed on television confirms television’s role as a social role model for imitation and problem solving, as well as for rejection of those same behaviors. “I wish we could have solved our problems just like that …,” sighs the girl following a happy ending of the comedy she has been viewing. Or, a father might scold his son by saying: “Where do you think you are, on some TV program?”

The viewing situation provides a common experience that brings the family together – in laughter, suspense, interest, as well as in physical expressions of togeth- erness, like body contact and hugging a child during viewing. Viewing television together at home can both facilitate conversation as much as it can suppress it, depending on the circumstances and inclinations of family members.

Avoiding interaction, too, is an important function of television for viewers. Television viewing and the attention it demands enables viewers to enjoy privacy and to relieve social pressures for constant participation in family conversations of an unpleasant nature. The child who seeks to unwind after a pressured day at school can watch a cartoon; a teen can wallow in melancholic feelings through viewing a sentimental movie; siblings seeking to separate themselves from the adults can do so by viewing pop music. All of these family members use television viewing to demarcate the boundaries of their personal space.

Using television to demonstrate competence as well as to attain dominance in the family setting is also a common social use. Family members may use television to assert their status in the family as well as to establish areas of expertise: for example, when they preemptively guess the plot’s development, shout out the correct answer to a quiz question, or provide a running commentary on the content of a news item. Furthermore, controlling viewing by a parent as well as by an older or younger sibling are means to mark out power spaces and family status hierarchy; as happens in the case of who controls the remote-control and the DVD player, or manages the recording technology.

On the other hand, the struggles over program choices in the main family setting are often a conflict zone representing the power relationships within a family: Do younger children have as much of a say in selecting programs as their older siblings? Research tells us that it is more likely to be the case that children join programs viewed by older family members than vice-versa. Similarly, we can ask: Do female family members have an equal chance of participating in and influ- encing program choice? Apparently not, as it seems that fathers dominate viewing in many households studied. Does anyone have the power to veto viewing choices at his or her digression? Once again, fathers were found to be more dominate. Is there one person who time and again has to have the final word? Here, too, it was the father.

Thus, as noted previously, we can learn a lot about parenting styles and gender relationships from the way families organize themselves around television viewing. Put another way, television viewing in the family is always contextualized within a particular social environment.16 Yet family viewing rituals are also grounded in a wider cultural environment and have culturally specific characteristics. In different

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cultures, families arrange the physical viewing space differently, have different concepts regarding time and its use, and hold different age and gender power structures.

The introduction of additional viewing technologies ‒ originally the video recorder, followed by a host of possibilities for recording, downloading, and controlling scheduling ‒ created new behavioral rituals, such as family viewing times, recording schedules and responsibilities, preparation and consumption of meals, and facili- tated individual viewing by family members at their own leisure and according to their own flexible schedule, in their own private spaces. The availability of multiple sets at home also unpacks power struggles around the television set and allows different members to control their own set. However, television sets at home have their own hierarchy of size, functions, and quality and one can learn a great deal from examining where in the home the best set is located, who gets the older set, and who got a new set for a birthday/holiday. Similar questions can be also asked about the availability and placement of computers at home.

We can conclude that children’s media habits are not solely a result of their own personal choice, but the product of complicated family constraints and possibilities, and long-term socialization processes. Children learn from their parents, older siblings, friends, and other significant people in their lives a variety of media use habits and appropriate gendered and age-related behaviors, all of which become part of their independent media repertoire.

Parenting Styles and Mediation

What role do parents play as mediators of the media worlds their children inhabit, either through direct intervention (e.g., by setting rules and holding conversations) or indirect influence (e.g., by providing role models for their children)?

The media “rules” that shape the media experiences and habits of families world- wide are often informal and non-visible. When interviewing family members, researchers often find themselves raising issues that operate on a subconscious level in the family, revealing agreements that are embedded deep within everyday life that have never actually been discussed nor even spoken out loud. Therefore, it is not enough to interview just one family member. For example, children may be completely unaware of the media-related rules, followed or violated, that the mother may be explaining to an interviewer. This poses an interesting theoretical issue: since using media is a routine, taken-for-granted activity, any attempt to formalize the norms involved in this may seem overly formalistic. Media “rules” are behavioral directives, based on the family’s general value and normative system that can be easily overturned by that family. For example, a family might have a rule of “no computer or TV after 9 p.m.” or “no mobile phone use during dinnertime,” but parents may actually encourage their youngster to break these rules on occasion and join them for an explo- ration of an exciting website, the viewing a favorite program well past bedtime, or when asking them to check the weather on their mobile phone during dinner.

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Research on parental mediation of television viewing suggests that parents’ involvement in their children’s viewing may operate on at least three levels. Awareness and co-viewing relates to the degree to which parents are around during viewing, are familiar with program contents, offer their children role models of viewing habits, and even view with them. Supervision, also termed restrictive mediation, relates to the degree to which parents supervise and restrict the viewing times, contents, and amount of their children’s television viewing, their use of viewing as a form of reward or punishment, and the degree to which they monitor secondary viewing behaviors (e.g., doing homework or eating while viewing). Finally, instructive mediation relates to the degree to which parents mediate between their children and contents viewed – through conversation, explanation, value judgments, processing of emotions, under- standing information, application of learning, critical evaluation and the like.17

Note that viewing intervention does not necessarily mean restricting television viewing, as is commonly accepted. If we operate under the assumption that televi- sion has positive as well as negative potential for children, we should expect parental interventions to also include the encouragement of certain viewing behaviors. They can do so by calling their children’s attention to valuable programs, applying televi- sion content to everyday experiences, using viewing opportunities as a positive socializing force, and the like. Such an approach occurs when parents tell their children: “Why don’t you do your homework later – come watch with us this great program about …” According to most research reports parents do not make these types of comments very often.

Overall, viewing television together with children has been demonstrated to be a desirable activity. In doing so, parents help their children to understand the medium of television as well as its content, encourage them to internalize messages selectively and critically, intervene immediately when children are exposed to content which is objectionable in their opinion, and handle emotional reactions of children. Though limited in number, a few case studies explored ways that encourage parental co-viewing and interventions in the early years. One such example was the introduction of the mommy bar – subtitles instructing parents on possible forms of mediation.18 The fact that more and more children are engaged in individual viewing, in the privacy of their own room or when there is no adult supervision at home, denies parents this possibility.

These three dimensions of potential parental intervention – awareness and co-viewing, supervision, and instructive mediation – are intertwined with parents’ own attitudes toward television. Some perceive television to be a destructive force in their children’s lives, even to the point of believing in the addictive power of the medium, and so take a protective stance toward it. Others see the positive sides involved in viewing television, and its role in providing entertainment, relaxation, and information to their children. Yet another group of parents finds that television assists them in the task of raising and socializing their children, while others allow children almost total freedom to determine their own viewing habits.

The research on parental mediation of digital media use is still very preliminary. However, one large European study did distinguish between five forms of such

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mediation: (1) active mediation included parental participation in activities and discussion; (2) specific active mediation promoted internet safety; (3) restrictive mediation monitored amount of time and nature of activities; (4) digital mediation monitored children’s activities with digital media; and (5) technical mediation of their activities19 by uploading censoring technologies on computers restricted access to some content or supervised the computer’s history. Most of the findings in this and other studies suggested that parents engage mostly in conversations about and impose restrictions on internet use. Parents may restrict the amount of time chil- dren are allowed to spend on the internet or provide the child with a mobile phone minutes-budget and limited data package, as well as the specific time of use (e.g., curfew hours at night, or during family meals). While some restrictions can be easily monitored, others, particularly those related to strategies of content supervision, have been deemed by scholars to be relatively ineffective.20 A study in Hong Kong, for example, found that families with a more authoritative parenting style, who spend more time together and have better family communication, and at the same time hold positive attitudes toward the role of the internet in their children’s lives, were more satisfied with the effectiveness of their mediation practices.21 Mediating new media use, so it seems, is not very different from mediating other dimensions of children’s lives.

This kind of research emphasizes the importance of understanding the place of media in the lives of children as an integral part of socialization processes taking place in the family as a social unit. For their part, parents derive their attitudes toward media from a broader public discourse related to children’s developmental processes and their own role as parents and educators. The attempt to find a delicate balance between the desire to protect children from what they deem to be undesir- able aspects of reality, such as violence, on the one hand, and the desire to prepare them to handle the complexity of adult life, on the other, creates a dilemma for parents lacking an easy solution. Setting clear media use rules and guidelines is not going to resolve such a dilemma, as this issue is negotiated on a daily basis between children and their parents, and between the parents themselves. Parents are aware of their inability to completely control their children’s media use and its influence on them. Many are not interested, willing to and/or able to assume responsibility for deciding what is good or bad for their children to be exposed to or use, and what kind of media experiences are desirable for their children.

Clearly, such attitudes cannot be viewed independently from the surrounding environment and other leisure options available to children. Whether television viewing or internet surfing is perceived as “good” or “bad” for one’s children is always a relative matter and highly contextualized, hence, the question is – compared to what? Compared to hanging out on the street in an urban slum area? To helping out in the fields or at home? To getting into trouble with armed soldiers or guerilla fighters? To taking guitar lessons in the community center? To playing soccer in the neighborhood playground?

Thus, media-related middle-class values of what is “good” or “bad” can be completely irrelevant in one setting, or can be a luxury in another social setting.

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A child of a lower income family with limited leisure options may do well spending time in front of television or a computer. An ethnographic case study of families in Saudi Arabia demonstrates this argument well.22 Media content that violates Islamic cultural values and religious rules was deemed to be unwelcome by families who stress that it is their role to transfer cultural traditions and values. Thus, perceptions of the value of media use as “good” or “bad” for children are clearly relativistic, can be one-sided, and all too often highly culturally laden. In fact, it would seem that the mere posing of the question in a binary manner between good or bad needs to be understood not in absolute terms but from the point of view of a specific culture.

This having been noted, there is some evidence that the authoritative, yet respectful and positive approach taken by US parents toward communication technologies and their central role in children’s lives does offer a solid basis for families to integrate them into their own in a constructive manner.23 The following suggestions were offered to parents who wish to adopt such a strategy:24 monitor child-activities based on clear rules; be familiar with the media texts children are consuming and converse about them regularly; serve as role models in parental media-related behaviors; prioritize family time devoted to joint activities; let children take the lead by following their expertise and preferences; use media for empowerment of all family members; change the conversation about media from a focus on moral panic and anxieties to discussion of active involvement and positive potentials; be actively engaged in creating positive opportunities for children; and become involved in activities that promote policy change, including reducing economic exploitation by mega-corporations.

Media-related conversations

Conversation is one of the main means employed by parents in attempts to be involved with their children’s media use and to mediate its consequences. Just as understanding media consumption requires its contextualization, so research of media-related con- versations must be studied within the social and physical surroundings: the physical setting, the presence of other family members and their composition, the activities in which all are engaged, and the social norms of behavior in place. Naturally, individual characteristics also influence the nature of interaction: the degree of parent or child fatigue or alertness, involvement and excitement from over-stimulation, as well as personal tendency for talkativeness or introversion. Finally, the nature of the content the child is experiencing affects interactions, as some programs, games, or websites are better facilitators of talk than others. Thus, as with other issues discussed, a com- prehensive account of any aspect of media experience has to take into consideration characteristics of the context, viewer, and medium.

Studying naturally occurring conversations in the family is a difficult task, as it involves intrusion in homes by a researcher, recording equipment, or a combination of both. The existing literature focuses almost exclusively on television, as most other screens are used more privately, and conversations focused on their use is less predictive and thus less studied. As a result, we know very little about how parents

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and children talk about these experiences, except for anecdotal renderings. Thus, the following discussion of the research literature regarding television can serve as a basis for inference, until a rich research literature about discussions generated by screen use can come into existence.

Most television-related conversations reported in the research can be divided into content and behavior categories. Often the two types are intertwined in the natural flow of talk.

Content-oriented conversations develop due to the fact that television often pres- ents an unfamiliar world to children that stimulates them to ask questions and seek more information. For example, the following excerpt documented a conversation between an eight-year-old boy and his mother in the USA over the death penalty, which occurred as they were viewing an action-adventure drama:25

Son: Is there still an electric chair? Mother: In some states. They want to vote on it. Son: What is it? Mother: It’s a chair where they strap you down like this. [She demonstrates.] And

then they pass an electric current through you so you die. It’s not good.

In addition to being informative, conversations such as this expose moral and political dimensions of parent‒child interaction.

Parents’ comments can expand the child’s informative world and/or reinforce knowledge gained from other sources, including school. This is demonstrated when a 12-year-old girl in the aforementioned study asked for information about England’s King George III, following a viewing of a theater production (Masterpiece Theater). When her mother explained to her that he was the king of England during the American Revolution, the child recalled learning about him in class. Thus, verbal intervention of parents has a very important role in reinforcing intended learning from other sources, as is often the case with educational and informative content. Furthermore, it was found that children remember information presented on the news much better when their parents elaborate on the information presented.

Indeed, research has found that even making limited comments while watching a program with children can advance learning. Mothers who were observed watching the preschool educational program Sesame Street with their children were found to be more attentive to the program, be more efficient learners, as well as to have much more fun watching it!

Interestingly, the mere presence of adults during viewing, without any form of intervention, is apparently very valuable for young viewers. An adult viewing together with a child conveys a message of interest in and respect for the program, as well as the pleasure gained from a social sense of “togetherness.” Thus, even “passive” adult participation encourages the child to pay more close attention to the program, so increasing the chances for better learning. For example, research conducted in Israel found that the presence of mothers during the child’s viewing not only increased viewing time, but encouraged and stimulated the child to be

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actively involved with it. In the USA, children demonstrated better learning of letters and numbers following viewing with mediating adults who called their attention to these messages and gave them feedback during viewing. Adults’ verbal inter- ventions, such as – “this letter is called B”; “let’s read this word together”; or “look, the Giraffe is a vegetarian, he only eats plants” – have very positive influences on children’s learning from television, just as they would if parents were engaging children about other stimuli in their environment. Clarification points regarding television content made by parents during viewing times, such as “what she means is that …” or “he was referring to …” , improved children’s ability to understand and make inferences from television content, and thus compensate for young viewers’ lack of knowledge and complement their viewing experience. Similarly, parental verbal intervention contributed to children’s abilities to make better comparisons between televisual reality and their understanding of everyday life.26

It appears, then, that a substantial amount and wide range of information, some trivial, can be acquired through television viewing and discussion. Occasionally, joint viewing can also induce conversations on very fundamental and sensitive topics, such as sexual relationships, death, suicide, prejudice, and religious beliefs, and create opportunities to elaborate on ideologies and value systems that do not arise during everyday family routines or that otherwise are uncomfortable for some family members to discuss. While a statement such as “Let’s talk today about homosexuality” does not sound like a natural conversation opener around the dinner table, the topic might be discussed quite naturally following the viewing of a comic stereotype or a news item discussing the debate over gay marriage. Like their children, parents differ greatly in their capabilities and desire to engage children’s queries or in the opportunities presented to discuss sensitive or complicated issues; from inability or reticence to eagerness to seize nearly every opportunity to engage the child in deep and serious conversation.

Behavioral, the second type of conversation engaged in during television viewing, refers to situations in which family members discuss behaviors observed on televi- sion related to their own or to others’ real-life experiences. For example, when a parent tells a child: “In our family we don’t hit each other like that”; or a child says to a parent: “See! Why can’t I have that too?” In conversations such as these, the content viewed on television provides a basis for comparison with the child’s real-life expe- riences, often presenting the latter as preferable. An illustration of this was related to me in a focus group of pre-adolescent girls in Israel: “Let’s say we are watching Beverly Hills. My mother immediately will go: ‘see how she has no shame at all!’ My parents really like to teach me a lesson from movies. For example: ‘see how she behaves; how would you have been in that situation?’ Those kind of questions.”27 A similar exchange in a study in the USA was observed while a five-year-old boy and his mother were watching a soap opera with a divorced mother as a character. In responding to her son’s inquiry about divorce, the mother reinforced her faith in their family’s loving relationship and remarked on the pain involved in divorce.28

In addition, television-related conversations can also play a significant role in helping children understand the constructed nature of the television world and to

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distinguish it from life in their own social environment. Parents comment to their children about the reality of television in a variety of ways: “This is (or is not) how things happen in the real world”; “This is (or is not) real.” A particular case in point is reference to “television families,” such as those depicted in situation comedies and dramas, since often they deal with a realm of life relevant to children who are members of any sort of family. This viewing situation raises questions, such as: How much do children perceive these families to be similar to families with which they are familiar, including their own family? How do parents’ comments facilitate children’s ability to be critical consumers of portrayals of family life on television?

As explained here, as well as in Chapter 2, we see that it is a very complicated developmental task for children to come to understand the nature of “real” on tele- vision, as this process is dependent to a great degree on the child’s stage of cognitive development, as well as on his or her accumulated experience of everyday life inside and outside of the television world. Parents’ comments can greatly facilitate development of their children’s critical abilities by reinforcing, expanding on, as well as negating television content; by exposing the unique audio-visual means by which television represents the world; as well as by providing additional sources of information and knowledge as the basis for comparisons.

Television as a talking book29

Even babies and toddlers at the stage of initial language acquisition were found to benefit from active, joint viewing with a caring adult. For example, we know that while viewing educational programs geared to their needs, such as Sesame Street, they learn vocabulary and concepts (e.g., geometrical shapes, colors) and are better able to identify letters and numbers. This process can be aided by parental interac- tion, as one North American mother of a 15-month-old baby girl reported: “She learned to count from Sesame Street and we reinforced it. I say: ‘one’ and she would say: ‘two-three-four’ and then I say ‘five’ and she would say ‘six.’”

Parents of babies and toddlers are more active in employing television content as “a talking book,” perhaps because this age group requires both closer supervision and more intensive investment in language development. Participant observation studies of parents caring for their young ones revealed at least three types of inter- related verbal exchanges: designating, questioning, and responding.

● Designating: This practice involves naming the objects and characters appearing on television, as we see in this example: “What is this?” a 2-year-old toddler asked her mother. “Look, it’s a flashlight. You see, it gives light,” responded the mother. Such a process has been found to help language acquisition as well as conceptual development. Similarly, mothers correct their children’s vocabulary, as was the case when a 20-month-old toddler watching a cartoon pointed and said: “Dog!” “No,” responded the mother, “it’s a rabbit, and also a cat.” Parents also encourage their children to practice new vocabulary. For example, during

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viewing of Sesame Street, a father asked his 15-month-old baby daughter: “What is this?” “A frog,” responded the baby. “And what’s that?” continues the father in calling her attention to the screen; “hop, hop, hop,” responded the baby. “What is it?” The mother continues to challenge the baby. “Ball” she responds. “Ball,” mirrors the mother. “Three balls. One, two, three.”

● Questioning: Parents have a variety of reasons for directing questions to their children during viewing, such as trying to direct their attention to the set, expressing their own involvement in the viewing, or posing a rhetorical question, one to which they are not really expecting an answer. For example, they com- monly say: “Do you want to watch …?” as they place the child in front of the television set and turn it on. Often the questions are not really intended to start a conversation, as they are behavioral directives, a form of viewing supervision and mediation.

● Responding: Parents respond to their children’s viewing behaviors by way of mirroring back their verbal utterances, expanding and/or correcting them, as in an exchange between a 25-month-old toddler-girl and her mother while they were viewing Sesame Street: Girl: “Boy.” Mother: “Boy.” Girl: “Yellow boy.” Mother: “Yellow boy.” Girl: “Boy.” Mother: “Another boy. What kind of a boy is this?” Girl: “Brown boy.” Mother: “Brown boy. And what is this?” Girl: “Girl.”

Parents also respond to children’s behaviors in a directive manner: “No, turn this on again!” or “Here is your song! Do you want to dance?” as well as answering direct questions. For example, in response to a 23-month-old toddler-girl’s question: “Is she going to preschool?” the mother said: “No she is not, although she wished she could.” Girl continued: “Am I going back to pre-school?” “We just got home,” answers the mother.

Aside from illustrating types of parent–child interactions during viewing, these exam- ples demonstrate the unique contribution of studies collecting observational data within the natural environment of viewing television in complementing other studies that are based on parental reporting of their children’s behaviors. These studies pro- vide us with unique insights into questions about the dynamics of interactions occur- ring around an operating television set, such as: What is the meaning of these kinds of conversations for parents and their children? How are they being integrated within the patterns of behavioral norms prevalent in their families? How consistent are the par- ents in their reactions to behaviors on television? How prevalent are such interactions in cultural contexts outside of the North American ones observed? These questions are of great importance in evaluating the influence such conversations may have on children’s behaviors. Future research may do well to examine similar conversations taking place around toddlers’ use of tablets, for example. We will return to the specific question of media and language acquisition in Chapter 2.

From what we know about children’s viewing of television around the world, it seems that joint viewing is quite a rare occurrence. Parents are usually over- extended, overly tired, and if they happen to be at home, they may well use children’s viewing as a quiet time to attend to another task or to re-charge their own batteries.

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In such cases, the most common type of parental intervention is likely to be an incidental comment as they walk in and out of the room, often of a negative nature, such as: “turn the volume down,” or “what is this nonsense you are watching, don’t you have anything better to do?” Even if these comments may be appropriate, they do little to encourage critical viewing of television and rather convey a general negative message toward the medium that may inhibit potentially positive learning experiences, when such are available. We can, therefore, conclude that while parents can potentially play many important roles in mediating television viewing, they differ greatly in their aptitude, motivation, skills, and the circumstances that facilitate doing so.

Finally, we should note that while the research reported here is television specific, there is very little accumulated research-based knowledge on parental conversations around other forms of media use, which are more individualistic in nature, such as video-game playing or internet surfing. While the same issues and possibilities can be applied in study of parent‒child conversations related to other media platforms and contents, we should also be seeking to determine if there are issues that are medium specific, such as: To what degree and in what ways are parents involved with their children’s website choices? Online or video-gaming? Social networking activities? How often do they engage in conversations about the content and values available to children through these media, about making choices and being critical of what they offer? The accumulating research about digital technologies and young people, to which we will return in the following chapters, suggests that in most cases, the answer is not very much.

Conversations with siblings and peers

To date, very little attention in research has been directed to joint viewing by children with siblings and friends, or to their engagement in media-related conversations. This is quite surprising given that, first, this is the most common viewing situation among children who grow up in the same household; and, second, we should be interested to learn about the role such significant-others play in children’s social, emotional, and cognitive development. From the little we know, it appears that children enjoy talking while viewing, as do many adults. They talk about the program, they talk about the logistics involved in the viewing, and they often embark on conversations stimulated by the viewing, although they may meander a long way away from it.

Here, too, data collected during a few observational studies in the USA provide us with some insights as to how this process operates in its natural habitat. For example, typically, children were found to ask older siblings for explanations and clarifications: “What is it?” “Why is he doing it?” “What does she mean?” Other questions might relate to understanding the codes and conventions of the audio- visual language. For example, questions that relate to trying to understand uses of the “flashback” (“how come he is back there?”), “re-runs” (“how did she do it again?”), “slow-motion” (“how can they run so slowly?”). Similarly, older children can facilitate younger siblings’ understanding of the structural characteristics of the

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broadcast schedule. For example, here is an interaction between two brothers age nine and six concerning the concept of a television “promo” following the viewing of one for a Pacman cartoon.30 The younger boy asked: “Can I see something for a second? (changes channel for a few seconds) not yet.” Observer: “What do you want to see?” Child: “They’re showing Pacman.” The older brother shouted: “They said this fall … Tell me, is it fall yet?” The exchange between the two brothers clearly served to help the younger one learn the meaning of a “promo” for a program that is intended for broadcast at a later time.

Other “why?” “how?” and “what will happen now?” types of questions relate directly to understanding the narrative. Older children were found to provide expla- nations and express tastes and preferences during viewing. In doing so, they may contribute to the viewing habits and understandings developing in their younger siblings. For example, while viewing a new series, the elder of three brothers declared: “No way are we watching this goofy show – it’s for dummies.” The two younger brothers agreed and the channel was switched.

Thus it appears that older children’s responses during viewing can facilitate understanding, allow the younger child to keep up with the narrative, acquire some basic television-literacy skills, as well as help shape more general attitudes toward television, just as is the case with the responses of adults. Similarly, when children watch with other children, be they siblings and/or friends, they are socially attentive and influenced by their behaviors, attention level, and interactions. Joint viewing is sometimes just that – a fun way to spend time together.

Mediating fear reactions

A much-debated public concern is the important issue of parents’ ability to mediate frightening images on television, movies or the internet, particularly those dealing with the negative sides of human existence – wars, disasters, poverty, atrocities, and famine. Today, children are exposed, increasingly, to such phenomena due to their high media presence, even in homes where parents actively try to shield them from such events. In an increasingly global world, even crises and catastrophes that take place in countries thousands of miles away become relevant issues for children’s daily lives. Children must cope with these frightening, worrying events that were once the preserve of adults alone. They must endeavor to assimilate fragments of information received via the media and try to make sense of them. They have to deal emotionally with the suffering of others and with gruesome portrayals of atrocities.31 Clearly the picture they develop of such events is a function of their developmental stage, life experiences, and the media offerings available to them.

Adult mediation at home and in children’s educational systems was found to be particularly important in such situations.

Clearly, frightening audio-visual content can be fictitious, based on real events, or even be “real,” as occurs during a direct but still mediated broadcast of events happening in real time. Scary or non-scary content is not an absolute concept,

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as children may react very differently to such content, depending on their age, experiences, context of viewing, and relevancy of the threat to their own lives. Here, as in other situations we have examined, age, gender, and cultural context are crucially important. For example, a preschool-age child may feel very threatened by make- believe monsters, sudden noises, close-up shots of snakes, or even dark scenes, but will be completely indifferent to a video footage or news discussion of weapons of mass destruction. On the other hand, a child living in Afghanistan, Syria, Chechnya, or Iraq may react in a completely different manner to a scene depicting tanks and soldiers compared to a child living in New Zealand, Italy, or Uruguay where there are relatively fewer incidents of military violence. North American children may react very differently to news about terrorism following the events of 9/11 or the bomb explosions that disrupted the 2013 Boston Marathon than before these events took place. And South African children may be particularly sensitive to discussions of high mortality rates associated with diseases such as aids and the large number of children living in orphanages in their country in comparison to those growing up in the Nordic countries.

Similarly, parental strategies necessary for handling fear reactions can differ significantly. More than by any verbal strategy, younger children can be more easily comforted by physical strategies such as holding, hugging a security object (e.g., favorite blanket or stuffed toy), or snacking. They have a hard time understanding the concepts of “rarely” or “very low chance” which may be used in attempts to distance children from threatening messages. “Earthquakes rarely happen”; “the chance of an airplane crash is very low”; “these kinds of catastrophes usually take place in other parts of the world” are not very efficient with children below school age. Indeed, it is very difficult to convince young children, verbally, that something that looks visually to be scary may not really be dangerous at all, while something that looks very appealing is indeed dangerous. However, as children grow older, the approach needs to be a more cognitive, rational one, rather than emotional, if we are to help them learn to recognize real threats, while gradually reinforcing their sense that things are “under control”; that the adults in their lives and in their society are working hard to protect them.32

Studies conducted following traumatic events that affected children in many countries of the world, in various manners ‒ such as the 1993 Gulf War, the September 11, 2001 events in New York, or the war in Iraq that began in 2003 ‒ reveal that an “ostrich” strategy, which assumes children are unaware and/or not concerned, is simply wrong. Research into children’s reactions suggests that their media-related questions need to be attended to and answered honestly, when appropriate to do so, and that their fears and concerns should be respected and legitimized. They need to know that their feelings and fears are being taken seriously and not dismissed by statements, such as “you’re still too young to understand” or “you shouldn’t be watching this.” If the child has already begun to watch a program, it is too late to tell him or her that “there is nothing to worry about.” What children need in such a situation is to be offered the means to express their anxiety and to share their thoughts about what to do about the situation, as minor as it may seem.33

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Disturbing news that relates to the emotional wellbeing of children, too, has been a focus of research and educational concern, and has led media producers and educators to seek ways to help children cope with fearful elements of the mediated world. However, little attention has been directed to the role played by such portrayals on television in developing in children a sense of social responsibility, civic awareness, empathy, compassion, and ethical issues related to the pain and suffering of others. Parents all over the globe who are raising their children within such perspectives can find media content to be an immensely important resource for discussing social issues and developing a humanitarian understanding in their children.

Concluding Remarks

Our discussion of media use as an integral part of the home ecology highlighted the centrality of understanding everyday media behavior as contextualized within family patterns and, in turn, how such behaviors are shaped by a host of other social processes. We can conclude by saying that media are an important force due to their central place in a family’s daily routines and the many social and personal roles they play for all members of the family. The concept of mediation allowed us to replace the commonly asked question of how television affects children with a very different one: how family life and the reciprocal relationships within it shape the experiences different family members have with the media. This approach emphasizes the important role of understanding everyday life and routine behaviors as part of an ecological approach to the study of media.34

We have pointed out that such phenomena require research methodologies that can problematize and investigate the depth and nuances of children’s media in everyday life. To do so requires a shift from functionalist theories of human behavior to cultural theories that when applied to media in the family, assume that media serve specific functions that contribute to the family’s stability. Most of the time such theories include the application of quantitative measures to study media functions, through surveys and experimental designs. What such a shift requires is inclusion of theories that posit that a negotiation process is used by children as active media users and that consider the contents of their media consumption as a form of meaning making grounded in specific contexts. Consequently, it also calls for different methods of inquiry: Integration of qualitative approaches that employ participant observation and in-depth inter- views were found to be extremely valuable in documenting and analyzing the dynamics of the very act of media use and meaning making.

We have also argued that discussion of families and everyday life needs to be rooted in an understanding of the complexity of cross-cultural differences including the different values attached to media use and diverse social practices. The way media fit in family routines is shaped by the wider culture, its values, traditions, and history. The concept of “family” itself, as the social context of media use, has a wide variety of meanings in different societies, as does the term “domestic” and its relationship to the “public.” Furthermore, societies change over time. While some

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societies seek to entrench norms, societies that allow flexibility see social norms grow and accommodate change, including significant changes that are taking place in home entertainment technologies.

This is why it is so important to study the meaning of media in the family longitu- dinally, as it changes over time, and so be able to follow typical developmental mile- stones. Doing so would enable us to answer such questions as: What are the roles of media in family life during the early years of child rearing? When children grow up? When they leave the home? When the parents are in retirement? Recent changes in the structure of both traditional and modern families have seen the emergence of many forms of family arrangements. At the same time, the media available to fam- ilies, too, have changed dramatically. All of these changes lead us to understand that the study of media in the family is a dynamic, meaningful, and fascinating field of inquiry. Children, too, are a diverse and complicated group of people who undergo significant changes as they grow up. As they do so, we are interested in studying such questions as: How do children of various ages understand media content? What is the relationship between their development and the meanings they acquire from their media engagements? We will turn now to Chapter 2 to explore these questions.

Notes

1. Ribak, 2009. 2. Livingstone & Bovill, 2001. 3. Jordan, 1992. 4. Chaffee & McLeod, 1972; Chafee, McLeod, & Wackman, 1973. 5. Lim & Soon, 2010. 6. Hemelryk Donald, 2008. 7. Hemelryk Donald, 2010. 8. Schofield Clark, 2013, pp. 201‒212. 9. Andreason, 2001. 10. Livingstone, 2007. 11. Silverstone, Hirsch, & Morley, 1992. 12. Mesch & Talmud, 2010. 13. Ribak, 2013. 14. Hijazi-Omari & Ribak, 2008. 15. Lull, 1980a; 1980b. 16. Gray, 1987; Livingstone, 1992; Morley, 1986; Walker & Bellamy, 2001. 17. Buerkel-Rothfuss & Buerkel, 2001; Valkenburg, Krcmar, Peeters, & Marseille, 1999;

Warren, 2003. 18. Fisch, 2007. 19. Livingstone, 2011. 20. Nathanson, 2013. 21. Wong, 2012. 22. Al Qurashy, 2008. 23. Schofield Clark, 2012. 24. Schofield Clark, 2013, pp. 218‒225.

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25. Quotes taken from Messaris, 1983, pp. 295‒296. 26. For a review see Fisch, 2004, Chapter 9. 27. Lemish, 1998. 28. Messaris, 1983. 29. Based on Lemish & Rice, 1986. Excerpts republished with permission © 1986 by

Cambridge University Press. 30. Quotes from Alexander, Ryan, & Munoz, 1984, p. 358. See also Haeffner & Wartella, 1987. 31. Smith & Moyer-Guse, 2006; Smith & Wilson, 2002; Walma van der Molen, 2004; Wal-

ma van der Molen, Valkenburg, & Peeters, 2002. 32. Cantor, 1996; Cantor, 2002; Smith, Moyer, Boyson, & Pieper, 2002. 33. Lemish & Götz, 2007. 34. Vandewater, 2013.

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