In our society, media has taken an active role in how we learn about politics, weather, global economy as well as other outlets. There are many other facets of the media that affect us without us even knowing it. Our children are being saturated with media messages everyday without our awareness. Messages, images, and opinions are being bombarded and “downloaded” all at once. It makes it hard for a young child to comprehend it all. This poses a major problem when dealing with our child’s education.
Many parents like to sit their child in front of the television to watch cartoons or Power Rangers. Let it be known that a simple show like Sesame Street offers many media messages to our children, but we just us it as a babysitter. The long-term effects of media saturation in a child has yet to be research in depth, but analysis’s are concerned that our youth are being transformed into media machines without the comprehension.
According to a Kaiser Foundation study, kids today spend an equivalent of a full-time workweek in front of media messages such as television and gaming systems. Who are teaching our children, the media or the parents? Parents need to take an active role in what our children are picking up from the media and regulate it if need be. We need to teach them how to “read” the media messages and how to interpret them.
Many parents like to sit their child in front of the television to watch cartoons or Power Rangers. Let it be known that a simple show like Sesame Street offers many media messages to our children, but we just us it as a babysitter. The long-term effects of media saturation in a child has yet to be research in depth, but analysis’s are concerned that our youth are being transformed into media machines without the comprehension.
According to a Kaiser Foundation study, kids today spend an equivalent of a full-time workweek in front of media messages such as television and gaming systems. Who are teaching our children, the media or the parents? Parents need to take an active role in what our children are picking up from the media and regulate it if need be. We need to teach them how to “read” the media messages and how to interpret them.
There are some websites out there that can act as a guide to parents to help them make better decisions about what our youth are seeing. Adults are increasingly finding out that they need to teach media interpretation skills to their children.
The Connecting Youth to a Brighter Future website offers important resources that can aid in teaching our youth. Just as we teach our children to read and understand what they are reading, we should be doing the same for media. The visual world we live in now offers vast amounts of pictures that flash bay the screen without much thought. We must teach them to look closely at these images and interpret the meaning. There are some techniques to teach our children:
- Us a newspaper or a magazine and occasionally discuss the main topics and what they mean.
- Show a random photo and ask the child to write a caption for it.
- Show a clip of a television sitcom and ask them to write their impressions.
These techniques are proven by the CYBF to enhance a child’s skills in understanding our media and how to decipher through it all.
How well do you know the media and how it is affecting you? Test your knowledge; take the media literacy test to see how much you really know!
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