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Marianne M. Hillemeier
TELEVISION
Since the middle of the twentieth century, television
has grown from a novelty to a fixture in 99 percent
of American households. Over time, the character of
the medium also changed dramatically. Once offer-
ing only three principal broadcast networks, viewers’
choices now may extend to more than a hundred
channels. By 1999, 78 percent of homes with children
and adolescents received at least basic cable, enabling
children to grow up with a wide variety of general au-
dience and child-oriented programming.
Television’s introduction was accompanied by ex-
citement and optimism, followed almost immediately
by criticisms and concerns about its impact on chil-
dren’s development. Critics linked television to every
ill effect from hyperactive toddlers to violent youth,
prompting consideration of regulations for children’s
television. Regulations have varied over the years and
have come to focus on requirements for educational
programming, limitations on commercial time in
children’s programming, and implementation of a
content rating system. Changes in regulations have
been fueled not only by political shifts but also by on-
going research on children’s use of television and
television’s influences on children’s development.
How Do Children Use Television?
To understand television’s potential impact on
development, one must consider how much children
watch television, how they direct their attention, and
what they comprehend.
How Much Do They Watch?
Children are consumers of a variety of media, in-
cluding computers, video games, print media, video-
tapes, music, and television. Although television is the
most commonly used medium, viewing time varies
with age. From two to seven years of age, children’s
viewing time is about two hours per day. Increasing
through childhood, it peaks at about three and a half
hours per day during middle school before dropping
off to about two and a half hours per day during ado-
lescence. The family environments of those who view
more television tend to share certain characteristics:
parents who watch a lot of television, television left on
as background noise, and a television in the child’s
room.How Do They Watch?
Children often have been characterized as ‘‘zom-
bie’’ viewers who stare mindlessly at television for
hours. Instead, naturalistic and laboratory studies of
how children watch television indicate that children
typically divide television viewing among a variety of
activities. At all ages, children primarily monitor tele-
vision content with short looks and only occasionally
engage in extended looks at the television. Just as
total viewing time changes across age, the percentage
of time children spend actually looking at the televi-
sion increases through middle school then drops
slightly during adolescence.
Another common misconception is that the
changing sights and sounds of television passively
‘‘capture’’ young children’s attention. Certain formal,
noncontent features of television production do
sometimes cause children to orient automatically
(e.g., a sudden loud noise, a rapid movement). Never-
theless, many features that attract or hold children’s
attention are informative, signaling content that chil-
dren are likely to find relevant or entertaining. For
example, the presence of children’s voices, peculiar
voices, sound effects, animation, and puppets cue
children to the child-relevance of the content. Chil-
dren’s ongoing comprehension also influences their
attention. If children are making sense of a program
and judging it to be ‘‘for them,’’ they are more likely
to keep attending to it than if it seems confusing or
adult-oriented.What Do They Understand?
Many have claimed that until late in elementary
school, children make little sense of most programs
because they are poor at selecting important events,
connecting events, and inferring causes of events.
Nonetheless, if plots depend on concrete action se-
quences, if dialogue and action support one another,
and if story events relate to children’s experiences,
even preschool children can understand relatively
complex stories.
To comprehend a televised story, one must un-
derstand information that is conveyed by production
techniques. For example, a viewer needs to infer that
a cut between a shot of a house’s exterior and a shot
of characters at a kitchen table conveys the exact loca-
tion of the characters. Young children are capable of
making such inferences, if they comprehend simpleTELEVISION 405