Does television viewing affect children’s cognitive development?
A child cognitive development is influence by many factors, including parent’s education and occupational status, number of sibling, social class of playmates, nature of the neighbor hood, availability of educational resource such as books in the home, opportunity for travel, and quality of schooling. A child from a privileged social milieu is much more likely to be exposed to situations that promote cognitive development. But almost all children in industrialized societies, even those in the poorest households, are exposed for several hours a day to a near universal factor-television.
Bogatz Studies on Child Developmental:
One of the best examples of the good that television can do is demonstrated by Sesame Street, a program devised to learning skills, such as counting, letter recognition and vocabulary. Children who watch Sesame Street have better vocabularies, have better attitudes towards school, adapt better to the classroom, and have more positive attitudes towards children of other races than those who do not watch the program, Bogatz on child developmental studies a large sample of 3-5 years old children form a wide range of socioeconomic backgrounds and found that children of all background profited from watching the programs.
However, the converse to this is that television can be considered a manipulative medium: sponsors aim many of their commercial messages at children, Bogatz studies on Child Developmental also showed children show better memory for advertisements placed during cartoons than during the Saturday morning programs. The older children seemed to be more immune to the advertising:
Although children spend a considerable amount of time watching television, the negative effects of their viewing appear to be negligible. Children do not appear to become mesmerized or over stimulated by television. Nor does television viewing appear to detract significantly from activities that would stimulate children’s cognitive development or substantially reduce their reading achievement. However, the possibility exist that television programs could do to stimulate children’s cognitive development. Educational programs and others that take into account children’s developmental needs would seem to be especially conducive to the stimulation creativity, language skills and pro-social behavior.
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