For TV-Watching Preschoolers, Seeing Is Believing

By Nancy Olsen-Harbich

With just 3 to 5 five years total life experience, preschooler’s are likely to believe what they see on television. According to child development experts, it is not until the second grade that children develop the intellectual ability to consistently tell the difference between real and imaginary.

This inability to distinguish between real and imaginary on television can result in unanticipated and unwanted consequences:

• While they can often follow at least some of a TV story line, young children don’t have a good understanding of cause and effect. For example, if a person is shown on television playing baseball in one scene and then sick in bed in the next, your child may get the idea that playing baseball leads to sickness.
• Their lack of worldly experience means children are more prone to believe stereotypes. If your child has little experience with older adults and those she sees on television are mostly fragile and feeble, she is more likely to believe that they all are and less likely to respect older family members and others.
• Fires, wars, or floods seen on television may scare children who do not realize that these disasters while unfortunate and harmful to many, are not an immediate threat to your family. On the other extreme, children can become conditioned to watching disasters and become passive viewers lacking compassion for the victims.
• Television can stress the worth of things—toys, food, vacations to theme parks—over the worth of people. Young children don’t understand the business of television is to make money, to make candy bars look bigger or toys more sensational, so that we will buy them.

Make Connections With the Reality of Your Own Life

Making connections with the realities of your family’s everyday life—from budgets to peace in the streets—can calm fears while expanding your child’s understanding of the world. “Talking back” to the television can also be useful in grounding your child in reality: remarking that the flood certainly appears dangerous but that it is far away or that a candy bar will certainly not last the whole day.

The First Amendment protects the freedom to express diverse points of views, but television is not your preschooler’s unalienable right. So while your child may sometimes feel “left out” if he can’t watch “what the other kids are watching,” you as the parent and not a network executive should get to decide whether your child is exposed to televised violence, sex (in the city or suburbs) or fools eating worms.

Nancy Olsen-Harbich is the Human Development Specialist at Cornell Cooperative Extension of Suffolk County. For more information about childhood and development programs, call 631-727-7850.