Television, Mediating Effects of Family Communication

Roger Desmond

An enormous body of literature in the social sciences explores the negative impact of television viewing on child development. Outcomes such as increases in aggressive behavior, lowered academic achievement, motor restlessness, fright reactions, and a host of other negative behaviors have been associated with excessive amounts of media use, including TV viewing and movies, video games, and computer use by children. The majority of investigations in mediation have focused on parent-child communication about television programming, as television is the dominant medium used by children prior to adolescence, and parents are the dominant agents of socialization for young children. Mediation is the pattern of communication by which parents comment on television content either during or subsequent to the child's viewing, and communicate information about the meaning of televised behavior, the parent's approval or disapproval of content, and specific rule making by parents about the amount and kind of television use Parental ...

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