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MEDIA INFORMATION
Many parents unknowingly relegate both their parenting responsibilities and their child's education to various electronic media. These commercial products have only profits in mind and not your child's best interests.
Extensive research has shown that several key factors interfere with the early developmental needs of babies, toddlers, and preschoolers:
1. A decline in one-on-one interactions with parents, grandparents and other caregivers.
2. Overexposure to electronic media (television, videos, computers, etc.-including "educational" programs).
3. The content of electronic media: excessive loudness, image bombardment, physical violence, materialism, and unrealistic, unhealthy problem solving.
Unfortunately, these factors are at work in most of today's homes, preschools, and child care facilities, undermining the health, school readiness, parent-child bonding and family stability of young children. The emotional and physical consequences of these factors on children often include inactivity-induced obesity, excessive aggressiveness, impulsiveness, irritability, and inappropriate risk-taking.
In a school setting they directly contribute to a decline in literacy, falling test scores, poor writing abilities, and inadequate oral expression. Just as seriously, they contribute significantly to difficulties with abstract language and thought, the essential elements of higher intelligence.
Early childhood educators recognize that parents are the most influential teachers their children will ever have. Parents teach by listening, responding, and elaborating on what their children already know. This style of parent-child interaction promotes curiosity, problem-solving, concept building, and positive self-esteem.
The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) strongly urges parents to avoid TV viewing entirely for children under the age of two years and to limit the viewing of all media combined to 1 to 2 hours a day for children over two.
Even educational media is overdone in most households. The average American child spends 3 to 5 hours in front of a TV per day and grows up in a home with 3 televisions, 3 tape players, 3 radios, 2 VCRs, 2 CD players, 1 video game player and 1 computer (Federal Trade Commission Survey May-July 2000). And it hasn't got any better since then!
The Early Childhood Information Clearinghouse documents that 9 month old children are watching an average of 90 minutes of television a day while preschoolers are watching almost 4 hours a day.
Peter Mangione, expert on early childhood learning, states: "The brains of today's children are being structured in language patterns antagonistic to the values and goals of formal education. How can children, bombarded from birth by noise, frenetic schedules, and the helter-skelter care taking of a fast-paced adult world, learn to analyze, reflect, and ponder? How can they use quiet inner conversations to build personal realities, sharpen and extend their visual reasoning? If a child spends an inordinate amount of time on video games (or television, or computer use) instead of playing and experimenting with many different types of skills, the foundations for some kinds of abilities may be sacrificed. These losses may not show up until much later. Tender young brains need broad, flexible development, not overbuilt neural pathways in one specific skill area."
Mary Hatwood Futrell, speaking for thousands of teachers nationwide: "I wish I could sit down with every parent in America and emphasize how important they are to their children's education."
In The Preschool Years, Ellen Galinsky and Judy David state: "The best predictors of good reading comprehension in primary school children are minimal TV viewing during the preschool period; nonphysical discipline; a curious, resourceful mother; and an orderly household routine. TV should not replace the primacy of books in children's early years. The best reading readiness consists of giving children experiences in the real world, materials to play out those experiences, and discussions that help them understand these experiences. What is essential is providing a language-rich environment."
Every hour a child sits in front of the TV is an hour they are not: making friends, reading books, using their imagination, playing outside in the sun, etc.
In addition, the content of these programs our children are watching is far more violent than adult fare.
Ellen Galinsky and Judy David, The Preschool Years-Family Strategies That Work-From Experts and Parents, found that TV violence causes ". . . children to act in more aggressive or hurtful ways and have more nightmares. Young children have difficulty separating the TV image from the real thing."
Galinsky's and David's research also noted that "TV viewing hampers children's academic performance, interferes with reading, perpetuates stereotypes, promotes impulsiveness and an inability to persist with tasks, and inhibits imaginative play. Television commercials foster materialism-creating appetites for expensive items that have little real value and create parent-child conflict."
We invite you to fully take charge of your children's education and give them the opportunity to achieve all they possibly can in life! We encourage you to use outside media wisely and only as a select part of your child's education!