Nonfiction
Into the Minds of Babes: How Screen Time Affects Children from Birth to age Five espouses the moderate view of limited and content-appropriate television usage for young children. It is written accessibly and is a nice mixture of entertaining anecdotes and scientific studies. It is a quick read, and can also easily be skimmed. While much of the scientific findings are common sense (young children often imitate what they see on TV), anyone reading this book is sure to be surprised and/or vindicated by something. This book is full of practical advice, including what programs are good/bad for teaching children various things (e.g. vocabulary, social intelligence, problem-solving).
Some random things I found interesting from this book:
Background noise (from radios, TVs, flight paths, city noises) has a strong negative affect on the ability of children to acquire language skills.
“The heavier the child, the more likely her or she has a bedroom TV set” (229).
From a study of 1,000 children from various countries, researchers have found that children do not “show signs of understanding the purpose of advertising” (222) until they are 7-8 years old. Children, even up to the age of 12, have a hard time differentiating advertising from content on web pages.
“In 2002, two researchers at the University of Connecticut decided to compare data on speech and language tests from sixty children ages 3-4, factoring in how much television-including educational television-they had watched. They found no correlation to any skill related to language development, save one: the children who watched the most television performed worse in tests of grammar than the other children in the sample. Grammar, it seems, is something that children need to hear and practice in real time situations, where what you say is contingent on what someone else says and vice versa” (148)
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