The Relations of Early Television Viewing to School Readiness and Vocabulary of Children from Low‐Income Families: The Early Window Project

Abstract

For two cohorts of children from low- to moderate-income families, time-use diaries of television viewing were collected over 3 years (from ages 2-5 and 4-7 years, respectively), and tests of reading, math, receptive vocabulary, and school readiness were administered annually. Relations between viewing and performance were tested in path analyses with controls for home environment quality and primary language (English or Spanish). Viewing child-audience informative programs between ages 2 and 3 predicted high subsequent performance on all four measures of academic skills. For both cohorts, frequent viewers of general-audience programs performed more poorly on subsequent tests than did infrequent viewers of such programs. Children's skills also predicted later viewing, supporting a bidirectional model. Children with good skills at age 5 selected more child-audience informative programs and fewer cartoons in their early elementary years. Children with lower skills at age 3 shifted to viewing more general-audience programs by ages 4 and 5. The results affirm the conclusion that the relations of television viewed to early academic skills depend primarily on the content of the programs viewed.

Evidence-based intervention for preschool children with primary speech and language impairments: Child Talk – an exploratory mixed-methods study

“…All three underserved groups discussed television, with mixed views. The evidence (particularly about different types of programmes 244 and the effect for different families and children [245][246][247] ) is unclear regarding the impact of television. This therefore merits further investigation so that appropriate advice is given to families, particularly in homes where the adults are not proficient in English and where the effect of watching television may be differential.…”

The Impact of a Healthy Media Use Intervention on Sleep in Preschool Children

“…32 The monthly mailings included a program guide tailored to the family' s available channels with recommended educational and prosocial television shows and schedules and a newsletter with tips and reinforcement. The criteria for recommended programming were based on previous research regarding the positive benefits of educational and prosocial media for young children [33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42] and were as follows: a TV Guidelines rating of TV-Y, being rated high on educational and/or prosocial value by CommonSenseMedia.org, and being currently available on network or cable television. In creating our final list, we sought to include programming that featured a diversity of gender, race, ethnicity, and culture and balance in terms of topical focus.…”

Parental media socialization and educational attainment: Resource or disadvantage?

“…Scholars testing displacement theory show that especially lowbrow (entertainment) television consumption absorbs time that otherwise might be spent on educational activities, like doing homework and reading (Hancox et al, 2005;Koolstra, Van der Voort, & Van der Kamp, 1997). Other studies, find that watching educational television programs enhances children's school readiness (Wright et al, 2001). In our study we must acknowledge that some parents supervise their children's television consumption, for instance by restricting or allowing TV viewing, to teach children how to use media in an advantageous way or to protect them from possible harmful effects, whereas others do not (Barkin et al, 2006;Valkenburg, Krcmar, Peeters, & Marseille, 1999).…”

“…Most research on television consumption indicates that television exposure harms children's academic performance and overall well-being (Hancox, Barry, Milne, & Poulton, 2005;Valkenburg, Cantor, & Peeters, 2001). Some studies however report positive effects of cer-tain TV behavior on children's cognitive and linguistic skills (Gentzkow & Shapiro, 2006;Wright et al, 2001). Parents are generally presumed to play a decisive role in teaching children how to deal with television's attractions (Sharif & Sargent, 2006).…”