Encyclopedia of Infant and Early Childhood Development

Television in Infancy and Early Childhood - Uses & Effects

John P. Murray and Ann D. Murray
School of Family Studies and Human Services
Kansas State University

Abstract

The use of television and other media—such as video, computer programs, and CD material—in infancy and early childhood can have both positive and negative influences on the intellectual and social development of young viewers.  Viewing carefully designed programs for preschool age children, such as Sesame Street and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, can have positive effects on social skills and academic preparation that enhance children’s development in preschool, early school years and even into adolescence.  At the same time, early use of screen media in infancy and toddlerhood, without the intensive support of parents and other caregivers, can disrupt the development of social skills that are normally acquired through consistent and continuous interaction with parents and significant others in the infant’s environment.

The history of research and policy discussions concerning media and early childhood is largely a history of research on “television” and children.  Indeed, the concern about the impact of television on the cognitive development and social behavior of children began in the 1950s in the United States and was initially focused on social behavior, particularly the impact of media violence.  By the mid- to late-1960s, there was a developing concern about the role that media (i.e., television) could play in facilitating or retarding cognitive development.  The landmark research in this latter area was the research designed to establish and evaluate Sesame Street, and other programs for preschool children.  However, by the 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century, concerns about young children and media had broadened to include computers, video games, and other forms of electronic “screen media” or interactive toys.

As a result of research and public discussion of children and media, legislators and scientific and professional associations began to suggest the need to formulate public policy and parental recommendations.  These were designed to monitor and curb some of the negative effects of media, while encouraging patterns of use that enhance the positive effects of media in the lives of young children.

The negative effects of screen media were associated with excessive amounts of time spent with media and the harmful effects of particular content such as violence or advertising.  The concerns about excessive time spent on media focused on the fact that “screen time” might take time away from other important activities of childhood such as imaginative play or interaction with other children as well as time spent with parents, being read to and playing, or exploring their expanding social world.   So too, the concerns about specific content such as violence, sexuality, and social role portrayals became important.  In addition, advertising for unhealthy food products that may lead to disordered food preferences and eating patterns that encourage unhealthy lifestyles were a major concern.  Finally, it has been suggested, by some psychologists and pediatricians, that extensive viewing leads to reduced attention span or increased hyperactivity and, in some recent speculative research by a team of economists, that early TV viewing can facilitate the induction of Autism in young children.
In response to these concerns, various professional and scientific organizations, such as the American Psychological Association, the National Association for the Education of Young Children and the American Academy of Pediatrics, have issued policy statements and recommendations about screen media effects such as violence, early childhood learning needs, and children’s social development and obesity.

Early in the 21st century, the American Academy of Pediatrics issued an advisory to its members entitled, Children, Adolescents and Television Policy Statement, in which it recommended zero screen time for infants under the age of two and only one to two hours of quality educational media per day for those beyond two years of age.  This is a fairly “lean” diet for infants and young children and far below the levels that we know, from studies such as those conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation, these youngsters consume in their typical daily lives.

Why would major professional organizations concerned with the health and well-being of young children adopt such stringent recommendations?  What do we know about the patterns of use and the effects of television and other media on the development of young children?  How can screen media (television, video games, internet information, interactive toys, and CD-rom or video educational material) be used to enhance the learning and lives of infants and young children?

Studies of American households consistently demonstrate that television, since its inception 50 years ago, has been a major feature of daily activities and, increasingly in recent years, computers, video games and other electronic entertainment are woven into the fabric of family life.

A recent report by the Kaiser Family Foundation, noted that babies six months to three years of age spend an average of over one hour per day watching television and about three-quarters of an hour using other screen media (computers, video games and other video/CD material).  Children between the ages of 4 to 6 show similar patterns, with other screen media increasing to about one hour per day. In addition to these patterns of use, the recent expansion of the production of television programs, videos and CDs for infants, such as Teletubbiesor Baby Einstein and related programming, have raised questions about the impact and appropriateness of such material for very young viewers.

Studies conducted in Australia by the Australian Broadcasting Authority, as well as studies in The Netherlands and the United States, have documented the widespread use of screen media by infants and toddlers.  The media environment, which children living in industrialized nations experience, is both rich and varied, even accounting for the differences in social and economic conditions across various groups within those countries.  For example, a study conducted in 2000 by the Annenberg Public Policy Center in the U.S., which was a national interview survey of 1, 235 parents of 2 to 17 year olds and interviews with 416 youngsters ages 8-16 years, found that homes with children under the age of 17 years contained a wide range of media: 98% of the households had at least one television set, 97% had a VCR, 78% subscribed to basic cable television services—with 31% subscribing to premium cable (with its expanded programming for children, along with more adult programming), 70% owned a computer, 68% owned video games, and 52% of households had access to online services connecting to the Internet.

In a related study by the Kaiser Family Foundation in 2003, which was a survey of 1,065 parents of children birth to 6 years, it was found that children under 6 years were spending approximately 2 hours per day with screen media (including television, computer use and video games—with 48% using a computer and 30% playing video games).  And, among the 4-6 year olds who used the computer and video games, they did so for an average of 1 hour per day.  In the Australian study of 157 families in Sydney-- which was a longitudinal tracking of children at ages 4 months, 12 months, and 30 months—they found that infants were exposed to 44 minutes of television per day at age 4 months, 62 minutes per day at 12 months, and 84 minutes per day at 30 months.  So too, a study using a nationally representative sample of the parents of American children, ages birth to 12 years, found that children aged 2 and younger watched an average of 10 hours and 45 minutes of television each week, while the same report, in a longitudinal study of  240 children from low-income families, found that total TV viewing increased from 19.2 to 20.8 hours per week between the ages of 3 to 5 years.

Thus, it seems clear that screen media, particularly television, occupy a significant portion of the daily activities of infants, toddlers and young children.  The next question is how do children come to understand and process the images that they are viewing and does this viewing and media interaction have any positive and negative effects on these youngsters?

We know that children begin viewing television and video material in infancy, and are exposed to significant amounts of this electronic storytelling throughout their earliest years.  Therefore, the process of viewing has received some research attention in recent years.  For example, in The Netherlands researchers investigated the attention patterns of 50, 6- to 58-month olds while they viewed segments of Sesame Street, Teletubbies, the Lion King and news clips, in their own homes.  The authors hypothesized that attention to the screen material should be maximized when the content was congruent—but slightly discrepant—with the infant’s developmental needs and interests, related to familiarity with the topic and content.   This approach posited the “moderate-discrepancy” view, which states that children pay most attention to television content that is only moderately discrepant from their existing knowledge and capabilities. In this study, “salient” content features (such as loud noise, bright or fast visual changes in the display) attracted the attention of the youngest viewers.  The authors report that these features also attracted the attention of the older viewers but, in addition to the salient content, the older children were also attracted to the nonsalient content features such as moderate action by the characters, letters and numbers, and meaningful dialogue.  The authors noted that this shift from salient to nonsalient content started between 1.5 and 2.5 years.  This is a particularly interesting finding because it tracks closely the long-known theoretical formulations of Jean Piaget concerning the use of symbols in the transition from Sensorimotor to Preoperational stages of cognitive development.

In other studies, a program of research on attention and comprehension by John Wright and Aletha Huston has provided an outline of the sequence of shifts in attention and comprehension during the early years of viewing.  In this program of research, the authors followed the viewing patterns of 240 children from low-income families in a large city in the Midwestern area of the United States, for 3 years, in two cohorts, from ages 2 to 5 and 4 to 7 years.  The authors found shifts in the types of programs viewed by preschoolers and early school years—a shift from less cognitively demanding to more demanding program content (with cognitive demand measured by the redundancy of scenes and characters—easier—and the amount of temporal integration required to understand the scene and storyline—harder).
 Building on the earlier work of Dan Anderson and and his colleagues, who demonstrated that children attended to content that was comprehensible even when it was presented with salient features, Huston and her colleagues outlined a clear pattern of shifts in attention based on children’s understanding of the production conventions associated with particular media content.  In this instance, the authors proposed that children quickly learn the “formal features” of programs that are ‘child-friendly’ and easily understood---the formal features of such programs include, for example, child and female voices as a prominent content feature.  As a result of these studies, the authors developed the notion that young children “sample” the television content to determine whether the program is child-oriented and potentially interesting and understandable.  This “stimulus sampling model” suggested that initial brief attention to the screen will increase if the child recognizes that the material is “appropriate” for their interests.  This notion was elaborated into the concept of the “Traveling Lens Model” of attention and comprehension in children’s viewing patterns, which is outlined in Figure 1.

Thus, the arousal of interest and attention will be highest if the stimulus material is perceived as falling between the poles of familiar vs. novel; simple vs. complex; redundant vs. inconsistent; repetitive vs. unpredictable; and expected vs. surprising.  Hence, children attend most to scenes that are moderately novel, of intermediate complexity, somewhat regular, somewhat ordered, and recognizable.

So, what are the implications of this extensive use of screen media in infancy and early childhood, coupled with the changing patterns of attention and comprehension throughout the early years of viewing?

Most of the concern about this early viewing and screen time has focused on the lack of interactivity between the infant and toddler and his or her caregiver.  As the American Academy of Pediatrics, noted, the most important activities and interactions in infancy are those social, face-to-face, interactions that establish the basis for interpersonal relationships.  Television and video viewing tends to be more solitary, although there are newer videos, such as that developed by Sesame Workshop (Sesame Beginnings: Beginning Together; a DVD for 6-months and up) that encourages parental involvement in the viewing experience by explicitly designing “co-viewing” tasks for caregiver and infant.

However, other concerns have been raised about the early viewing experience and the effects on later development.  Marie Evans Schmidt and Dan Anderson, in the Pecora, Murray and Wartella book, review the evidence for and against such viewing by noting the positive gains from viewing specific educational programming vs the tradeoffs concerning lost interpersonal interaction and the charges that such viewing leads to reduced attention span or intellectual and physical passivity.  As the authors note:  “To us it is clear that most of the effects of television on cognitive development and academic achievement stem from the particular content viewed.  There is little question but that educational television programs teach, and that this teaching has beneficial short- and long-term consequences for schooling. These consequences are due not only to academic content and skills learned from the programs, but also from the social teaching of impulse and aggression control.  Most of the negative effects of television stem from entertainment programs, particularly those with violent content.  The negative effects include reading displacement in the early elementary years and modeling of aggression, restlessness and impulsivity. (Schmidt and Anderson, 2007 pp. 77-78).

With regard to the development of behaviors that are incompatible with smooth progress in social and intellectual development, it is the issue of the fostering of restlessness, impulsivity and disrupted attentional processes that has sparked the most concern.   For example, Dimitri Christakis and his colleagues, in a study of 1,345 children, found that an extra hour of daily television viewing at ages one and three led to a 10% higher probability that children would exhibit behaviors consistent with a diagnosis of ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) by age seven.

Following on this research, a team of economists led by Michael Waldman at Cornell University, explored the possibility that extensive television viewing in infancy and early childhood might serve as a “trigger” for the development of Autism in young children.  This is a highly controversial proposition, but the authors provide interesting statistical analyses showing correlations between autism rates at the county level in California, Oregon, Washington, and Pennsylvania and variables that should be correlated with early childhood television viewing.  Using the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics study of the “American Time Use Survey” they first show that TV viewing by children under three is positively related to the amount of precipitation in the environment.  They then examine county level autism rates California, Oregon and Washington (which have varying levels of precipitation), and show that autism diagnosis rates are positively related to precipitation as the television-as-trigger hypothesis would suggest.  In a second test of the hypothesis, the authors compared cohorts of children in California and Pennsylvania who were born between 1972 and 1989 and found that the county-level Autism rates were significantly related to the percentage of households who subscribed to cable television even after controlling for the trend increase in cable percentages during the 72-89 time period.  Thus, the authors conclude that the findings from their “natural experiments” are sufficiently suggestive of the television-as-trigger hypothesis that more direct testing is warranted.

Naturally, there is much discussion about the speculative and complex trail of correlations outlined in the Waldman, et al. study of Autism and early TV viewing.  However, there is evidence discussed earlier by Schmidt and Anderson and Christakis and his colleagues, suggesting that both the content (violent, high-action programs) and the amount of time spent viewing television in early years can lead to increases in impulsivity and disorders of attention.   Also, brainmapping studies by John Murray and his colleagues, of older children (8-12 years), demonstrated that there are unique patterns of brain activations associated with viewing violence—focusing on the Limbic system and areas of trauma memory storage (i.e., the posterior cingulate).  Furthermore, descriptions of the behavioral manifestations of Autism note that one of the striking characteristics of children at high-risk for Autism (children who have older siblings who are Autistic) is their failure of “disengagement of visual attention” such as their inability to “break attentional contact” with the television screen when viewing.  Clearly more research is needed in this area, but this highlights some of the concerns about excessive amounts of “screen time” and the potential influence on infants and young children.  However, on a more positive note, Anderson and his colleagues, in a 2001 Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, reported on their longitudinal study of the impact of educational programs such as Sesame Street.  Their findings show that Sesame Street viewing at age 5 years not only prepared children for preschool and early school years but also predicted better High School grades in English, math and science.

Thus, there are both positive and negative outcomes from early experience with screen media.  However, the cautious response to questions about the effects of television and other screen media in infancy and early childhood is to limit the amount of exposure to these media and to very carefully monitor the content of the program material by emphasizing planned educational programming and maintaining parental interaction in the young child’s viewing experience.  As many psychologists and pediatricians have noted, it is the “human interaction factor”—not technology—that  most advances the intellectual and social development of infants and young children.

Additional Readings
Anderson, D.R., Huston, A.C., Schmitt, K., Linebarger, D.L., & Wright, J.C. (2001).  Early childhood television viewing and adolescent behavior: The recontact study.  Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 66(Serial No. 264).

Bryant, J.  & D.R. Anderson (Eds.) (1983). Children’s understanding of television: Research on attention and comprehension. New York: Academic Press.

Christakis, D.A., Zimmermann, F.J., DiGiuseppe, D.L., & McCarty, C.A. (2004).  Early television exposure and subsequent attentional problems in children.  Pediatrics, 113(4), 708-713.

Fisch, S.M. & Truglio, R.T. (2001).  “G” is for growing: Thirty years of research on children and Sesame Street.  Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Murray, J.P., Liotti, M., Ingmundson, P.T., Mayberg, H.S., Pu, Y., Zamarripa, F., Liu, Y., Woldorff, M.G., Gao, J.H., & Fox, P.T. (2006).  Children’s brain activations while viewing televised violence revealed by fMRI, Media Psychology, 8(1), 25-37.   

Pecora, N., Murray, J.P., & Wartella, E.A. (2007).  Children and television: Fifty years of research.  Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Waldman, M., Nicholson, S., Adilov, N. (2006). Does television cause Autism? (Working Paper No. 12632).  Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research.

Wright, J.C., & Huston, A.C. (1983).  A matter of form: Potentials of television for young viewers.  American Psychologist, 38, 835-843.

Glossary

ADHD  (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder): A biologically based psychological disorder that is characterized by restlessness, impulsivity, inattention and distractedness.

Autism (or Autism Spectrum Disorders):  A developmental disorder characterized by deficiencies in language and communication, social interaction skills, and the presence of repetitive behaviors and obsessive-compulsive (OCD) interests.

Formal Features:  Production features of television and other screen media programs such as pace, film angles and cuts, sounds, voices (male, female, child), frequency of scene changes, temporal integration.

Moderate Discrepancy Hypothesis:  The notion that young viewers will attend to visual portrayals that are moderately novel, moderately complex and somewhat surprising in the context of the viewer’s experience (see, Traveling Lens Model).

Screen Media/Screen Time:  A general category of a range of media involving visual stimulation, including computer games, CD material, television and video.  Also, the amount of time spent with such media is described as “screen time.”

Traveling Lens Model:  A model for describing the factors that enhance or diminish children’s attention to screen media; such factors as novelty, complexity, consistency, integration and repetitive vs. unpredictability.

John P. Murray, Ph.D., is a Professor of Developmental Psychology at Kansas State University.  He received his Ph.D. in Psychology from The Catholic University of America in 1970 and took Postdoctoral training in Pediatric Psychology at the University of North Carolina Medical School in 1972.  He has conducted research on children and media at the National Institute of Mental Health, the Boys Town Center for the Study of Youth Development, the Mind Science Foundation of San Antonio, and the Center for Media and Child Health at Children’s Hospital Boston.  He has taught at Macquarie University in Sydney Australia, the University of Michigan and Kansas State University.

Ann D. Murray, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Developmental Psychology at Kansas State University.   She received her Ph.D. in Psychology from Macquarie University in Sydney Australia in 1978.  She has conducted research on infants and toddlers at Crown Street Women’s Hospital in Sydney,  the Boys Town Institute for Communication Disorders in Children in Omaha Nebraska, and for the Child Language Program at the University of Kansas and for Kansas State University.