Children and Media: Fight Stereotypes and Creating with Media

[Elisa Keisha]

TV, movies, videogames and the Internet often show people in an overly simple way, giving an inaccurate idea of what they are allowed to say and do and how important or unimportant they are. This often takes the form of stereotypes—recognizable but inaccurate views of one group of people by another. Some common stereotypes show women as weak and certain ethnic groups as lazy or scheming. Challenge your child to question what she sees and hears, so she develops an eye for sexism, racism and other prejudices in mainstream media portrayals.

Ideally, your child will come to realize that images on TV or in movies are not reality. Instead, they are the result of a producer's, a writer's or an actor's point of view. Whenever possible, encourage your child to question limiting views of people and cultures by looking for more information.


7 Ways to Fight Stereotypes

1. Talk to your child about multiple cultures.
Be on the lookout for media that uses accents or skin colors to connect negative behavior with a certain cultural group. Are some cultures made out to be dumb? Unimportant? Aggressive? What does this reveal about our attitudes toward a given culture?


2. Help your child identify gender stereotypes in media.
Point out differences in the ways males and females are shown in media. Ask why men are often the heroes, whereas women frequently play less important roles. What does it mean to "act like a man?" To "behave like a lady?" Who makes these decisions in each program? How do you think they make them?


3. Keep an eye out for stereotypes about age.
Use TV and movie characters to help your child see that not only the young are capable and not only the old are wise. Teach your child that elderly people are not always feeble or easily duped.


4. Talk to your child about how he sees himself.
Find out what comparisons your child is making between his appearance or actions and those of a character. Talk to him about the difference between feeling good about himself and feeling superior to others. Encourage him to take pictures or write stories that express his individuality.


5. Introduce your child to story characters - and real people - who take part in all kinds of activities.
Ask librarians, media specialists, friends and your family to recommend books, TV shows, videos and software programs that feature a variety of cultures or present men and women in nontraditional roles. Also seek out stories that show a wide range of body types, personal traits and talents.


6. Teach your child that images of beauty are often illusions.
Your child may not realize how much work hair stylists, make-up artists, clothing designers and personal trainers do to make one person look like a star. She also may not know how easy it is to manipulate images to make models and actors look much better on the page or the screen than they do in person. Break the spell of TV shows and advertising by suggesting what goes on behind the scenes.


7. Speak out against stereotypes or absences in the media.
By pointing out negative portrayals based on race, gender or ability, you teach your child not to accept inequity. He will begin to appreciate that characters don't have to be portrayed in a narrow way, and that many behaviors and roles have value. If possible, point out when representations of certain cultures or people are missing.

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Source: http://www.pbs.org/parents/childrena...preschool.html

[Elisa Keisha]

CREATING WITH MEDIA

Media tools - computers, digital cameras and sound recorders - can help your child discover that, as great as it is to be entertained and enjoy somebody else's version of fun, it's even better to enjoy fun that is entirely of her making.

Through the process of making her own productions, your child will begin to appreciate that TV shows, video games and movies do not simply appear. People make them. As a result, her hands-on production experience will influence the way she sees, listens to and plays with media made by other people, allowing her to ask questions about how they were made and why. It also will help her discover that she can be more than a consumer: she can be a Web developer, a digital artist, an online storyteller, a game designer, a composer, a filmmaker or just about any other kind of creator she wants to be.

PRESCHOOLERS

Talk about what a story is when reading books or watching TV.
Help your child understand that a story has a structure — it has a beginning, middle and end — and that there are different kinds of characters, like princesses, witches and villains. Ask: Did that happen at the beginning of the story or the end? How come? What happened next? Why do you think the witch did that?


Make a scrapbook out of pictures and other items from activities you do with your child.Use a double set of prints from a traditional camera or images that you have taken with a digital camera to assemble a book. Give your child opportunities to make choices, such as which picture goes where and what a caption should say.


Give your child a chance to play writer and director.
Write down a script as your child tells you a story then have her cast family members in various roles. Have everyone play his or her part as you read back the story. Ask about the characters: What do they like to wear? Do they have any special powers? Who is in their family?


Use the computer to create art with your child.
Print out black-and-white pictures and help your child use crayons or paints to bring them to life. Better yet, use a scanner to make a digital version of your child's artwork. That way she'll see that something she has made can end up on a computer.


Make a recording of your child singing and reciting rhymes and funny words.
Have fun making up new sounds and songs. Remember to stop often to play back what you have recorded, letting your child enjoy the sound of her creations.


Help your child send a letter or email message to family and friends.
While you type or write and your child dictates what she wants to say, you can offer prompts that will introduce her to the conventions of writing, such as how to begin and end a letter.


GRADE SCHOOLERS

Let your child take a turn if you have a family camera or camcorder.
Give your child a chance to decide what images should be snapped or recorded. During playback or after the film's been developed or downloaded, ask your child what she saw and what stories she'd like to tell. To learn more about self-expression and images, check out the Literacy Through Photography site.


Introduce your child to the inner workings of photography by making a pinhole camera.Discover together how photographs are made. Check out sites like Oatmeal Box Pinhole Photography or the Pinhole Spy Camera for step-by-step instructions. Ask: How does your picture look like something you've seen on TV or in a book? What makes it different?


Help your child realize that curiosity can lead to creating by checking out official outlets for kids' creations.
Introduce your child to organizations that feature the creations of kids her age. The Chicago International Children's Festival, the New York International Children's Film Festival, and the Childnet Academy Awards are possible starting points.


Encourage your child to experiment with language by making up rhymes, learning another language, or comparing an oral version of a story to a visual one.Take advantage of computer software and TV shows that use rhyming and foreign language activities, making sure that your child has opportunities both to listen and speak. Check out audiotapes from the library or online that tell a story with words and sounds rather than pictures.



PRE-TEENS

If your child is interested in games, encourage her to make her own.
In addition to experimenting with basic programming, your child can learn how to break a game down into its components: rules that govern play, incentives that keep players interested and the structure that holds the game together, like a storyline or a problem that needs solving. ToonTalk and Stagecast's Creator are commercial game-making software for beginners.


Help your child find her voice through writing and online publishing.
Take your child on a tour of the many online magazines and Web journals where she can publish her poetry, stories and thoughts. Kidnews and KidsPub may be good places to start. Help her make her own "book" or "magazine" with photographs and construction paper or using software that incorporates electronic text, images, sounds and video.


Encourage your child to compose, record and perform music.
Making More Music is an example of a popular CD-ROM title, and there are many Web sites that feature background information on instruments and music-making.


Get your child experimenting with the visual.
Digital cameras will put your child behind the lens and get her thinking about framing a shot. Software, like Kid Pix, will allow her to manipulate photos and design original artwork.


Combine your child's interests in audio, visual and storytelling with film production.Let your child use the family camcorder or equipment from school or the library to make his own movie. Your child can use siblings and friends as her audience or submit her film to a children's film festival, like the Chicago International Children's Film Festival and the New York International Children's Film Festival.


Enroll your child in a media class or technology competition.
In addition to finding introductions to media production online, check out museums, special library programs and community college courses that offer film, radio and Web instruction. If your child likes friendly rivalry, look for media-related contests.


Make the most of your child's interest in writing electronically by helping her find Web sites that publish poems, stories, editorials and other writing by young writers.Stone Soup is a print magazine that is exclusively for writers and artists ages 8-13, and Crunch is an online magazine for young writers maintained by the National Center for Education Statistics. Considering how her work will be received by an audience may change how your child thinks about what's she's expressed.

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Source: http://www.pbs.org/parents/childrena...ing-teens.html

[Im The Truth]

Let Us Return

[Tehuti-4]

he Plug-In Drug

The Plug-In Drug
25th Anniversary Edition
Synopsis

How does the passive act of watching television and other electronic media -- regardless of their content -- affect a developing child's relationship to the real world? Focusing on this crucial question, Marie Winn takes a compelling look at television's impact on children and the family. Winn's classic study has been extensively updated to address the new media landscape, including new sections on: computers, video games, the VCR, the V-Chip and other control devices, TV for babies, television and physical health. Winn shows examples of how parents lose control of their children's TV watching. The book's major purpose is to help families regain control of this powerful medium.

"Declining SATs" and "The Good-Enough Family"

Two excerpts from the 25th Anniversary Edition

Mystery of the Declining SATs
There is an old, unsolved mystery involving scores on the SATs, those tests of verbal and mathematical abilities that high school students must take to be accepted into most colleges. In the mid 1960’s the average scores on the verbal part of the SATs began an almost 20 year decline. In a range from 200 to 800 points, the average scores went from 478 in 1964 to 424 in 1980– a drop of 54 points. At the beginning of the 1980’s the scores began to level off, and have stayed within five points of 424 to this day.

What brought about this troubling decline? Why did it begin just when it did? People have been trying to find the answer to these questions for years. Yet no one seems to have pursued a related question that may offer a clue to the mystery: What caused the decline to end around 1980, with no significant decreases or increases after that? Juxtaposing the SAT scores of high school students during the last 40 or so years with some statistics about TV ownership and viewing times during those years, may help to answer all three of these questions.

In 1977, when the scores had almost reached their nadir, a panel commissioned by the College Board concluded that a major factor for the lower scores was the greater diversity of students taking the test – more minority students, some of them not native speakers of English, were now striving to get into college.] Yet the great increase in minority test-takers cannot be the explanation: the verbal scores of white, middle-class, native-speaking students had declined along with everyone else’s scores.

Various other explanations have been offered for the decline. A Cornell sociologist blamed it on the dumbing down of text books. He showed that latter-day sixth-grade texts are on the same level of difficulty as 4th grade McGuffey readers were in 1896 and pointed out that the decline began when the first wave of Baby Boomers, who had used those simplified text books, sat down at the SAT test tables. But he didn’t explain why the decline suddenly ended around 1980, though the same texts remained in the classrooms.

Others have suggested less effective teaching in the schools. Yet that wouldn’t explain why the decline has been greater in verbal skills than in math skills. And even if it turned out that only reading and language arts teaching had fallen off, while good teaching, for some reason, had managed to prevail for math, it still would not explain why the decline leveled out after a number of years.

How about television’s arrival in American homes as a primary cause? The timing is right. The first generation of children who had watched television during a significant part of their childhood, sat down to take its first college boards during the mid-1960’s, just as the decline began.

The fact that the verbal scores went down far more than the math scores lends support to the theory that TV was a causal factor. As Chapter 7 argues, extensive television viewing effects young children’s verbal development more than the development of their visual or spatial abilities. And as the previous section indicates, numerous studies have shown a strong negative association between television viewing and school performance. Reading achievement seems especially vulnerable to the effects of excessive television viewing and reading, it is universally acknowledged, is the key to academic success.

If indeed television viewing adversely affects children’s verbal abilities, then one may begin to explain the steady decline of verbal SAT scores starting in the mid-sixties by the steady increase in television ownership year after year from 1950 on. In 1950 fewer than 8% of American families owned TV sets. By 1954 more than half had televisions. By 1957, 78% of families were set owners, and by 1964, almost everyone -- 92%. of families had become TV viewers. The saturation point had just about been reached, though set ownership would slowly inch up another 4% during the next 20 years.

The mid-sixties, when the decline in scores began, was when the first children who had spent their formative years watching TV–those who were about three in 1950—turned 16 or 17 and took the test. Every year through the sixties and seventies, thanks to the increase in set ownership, a larger cohort of TV watchers took their SATs, and every year, the scores went down, down, down: from 478 in 1964 to 471 in 1966 to 460 in 1970 to 445 in 1973 to 434 in 1975 to 429 in 1978 and finally to 424 in 1980. That’s when the scores stopped going down. Why? At least partly because the saturation point had been reached around 1964. So sixteen years later the scores bottomed out. They have stayed at about the same level ever since.

Set ownership is not the only factor. More important is the amount of time spent watching. Another explanation for the steady, two-decade-long decline lies in the steady increase in children’s viewing time from 1950 through the 1970’s. The students who scored 478 in 1964 had watched 0 hours during their formative years, having been born in ‘47 or ’48, before TV became a mass medium. They probably didn’t acquire a time-consuming TV habit, until they were in high school, with a lot of reading and other verbal experience under their belts by the time they took their SATs.

After 1950 children’s average weekly television-viewing time began to rise, year after year. One study indicates that first- and sixth-graders (the two groups chosen for that particular study) were watching about an hour more television daily in 1970 than in 1959, and that Sunday viewing had increased by more than two and a half hours for the sixth-graders.8 The rise in viewing time eventually leveled off – after all there wasn’t that much more time left in the day, after school work, chores, sports and a few other activities that continued to compete with television for children's time. And the decline leveled off as well.

Another suggestive pattern emerges when noting the decrease is characterized by changes in the two extremes—fewer high scores and more low scores—rather than an across-the-board slippage.

Why the decrease in high scores? In 1959 the brightest sixth-graders were found to be among the heaviest users of television while the brightest high school students were found to be lighter viewers and heavier readers than their less gifted classmates.Anxious parents were reassured that television would have little effect on their children’s destinies, since by tenth grade the bright students turned to books just as they had always done.

But by 1970 this comforting trend had been reversed. The Surgeon General’s report showed that now more of the brighter students in tenth grade were heavy users of television than heavy users of books.10Television now reigned supreme in the lives of the group that had once contained the most avid readers—the most gifted students. As these brightest students watched more TV, their college board scores began to decline. Year after year the number of students scoring in the 600 to 800 range on the Verbal SATs dropped steadily, going from 112,000 in 1972, to fewer than 72,000 in 1990, a decrease of more than a third.

Why had the scores of those best and brightest test-takers taken a dive? It seems likely that before they succumbed to television, their verbal and analytic abilities had been sharpened and deepened by extensive reading. As more of these students replaced books with TV viewing, their scores decreased dramatically.


[Note: A long footnote clarifying changes in the way SAT scores are published today, as well as others giving sources of all statistics in this section are given on pp. 321-322 of the new edition]

The Good-Enough Family
[a new preface spelling out the book's purpose]

All families are not created equal. Some seem to be spectacularly successful. Others are a total mess. And then somewhere between the heights and depths are most of the rest of us.

The Spectaculars are so comfortably in charge of their children’s lives that they don’t need to establish rules about television watching. Their family life is rich and satisfying. Television never seems to take precedence over human activities—conversations, games, leisurely meals, reading aloud—in this somewhat unreal family.

The troubled families at the other extreme are all too real: parents who don’t get along or who’ve split up, who are abusive, addicted to alcohol or drugs, who don’t understand the first thing about children and their needs, who are too immature, too disturbed, too self-absorbed to place any great value on family life, and whose children, consequently, are likely to have more than the usual share of difficulties. Though excessive television watching is a common symptom of family pathology, these families are not likely to find that watching less TV is going to make much difference in their lives. They have too many other basic problems to deal with first.

The British psychiatrist D. W. Winnicott once coined the phrase “good-enough mother� to describe a parent who may have considerable problems raising her children but still does a good enough job to avoid causing any serious psychological damage.

Similarly one might define a “good-enough family� as one neither so perfect as to be invulnerable to normal human weaknesses nor so precariously balanced as to be swamped by its troubles. Most American families, I believe, fall into this category. The good-enough family may have its shortcomings; nevertheless the parents care deeply about their children’s well-being and strive to make their family life as good as possible. They are the ones for whom television control may make a crucial difference.

In the wide range of good-enough families some might be called “better-than-good-enough,� indeed, approaching the borders of “spectacular� territory. Others are “barely-getting-by,� rapidly heading for deep trouble. For many families, how they control television may decisively influence whether they go in one direction or another.

The idea prevails, perhaps because of this book’s negative title, that my answer to parents’ problems with television is to promote its elimination altogether. But that has never been my purpose. I know that my most persuasive arguments will never make television go away, nor would I want it to. I am not an enemy of the medium nor do I believe it is devoid of value.

My aim, instead, is to promote a new way of thinking about TV. I believe that if parents understand the medium’s power and look squarely at the ways it affects their children and their family life, they can begin to take the necessary steps to deal with television successfully. To help parents and families with this task is the purpose of this book.

Quotes from reviews of The Plug-In Drug:

From Library Journal:
"After 25 years, Winn (Children Without Childhood) has completely revised and updated her landmark study of the influence of television on children and family life by incorporating findings based on recent research and investigating the impact of the home computer, the VCR, and the video game terminal. She has also shifted the focus from the TV programs children watch to the negative effects of television on children's play, imagination, and school achievement. Although Winn pinpoints many key shortcomings of television, this study is not argumentative; Winn instead aims to stress the quality of family life without television, to show educators and parents how to control the medium, and to offer practical suggestions on how to improve family life not dependent on television. This refreshingly candid and inviting study is highly recommended for both public and academic libraries."

From Jim Trelease, author of The Read-Aloud Handbook:
"No one has captured the devastating effects of television the way Marie Winn has. The latest research coupled with candid and inspiring correspondence from actual families make this the best edition yet."

From The Christian Science Monitor:
"If you have children who watch television, you owe it to yourself -- and them -- to read this book."
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TV FACTS AND FIGURES http://www.tvturnoff.org/images/fact.../FactsFigs.pdf