Television, Mediating Effects of Family Communication

Mediation

The majority of investigations in mediation have focused on parent-child communication about television programming, as television is the dominant medium used by children prior to adolescence, and parents are the dominant agents of socialization for young children. Mediation is the pattern of communication by which parents comment on television content either during or subsequent to the child's viewing, and communicate information about the meaning of televised behavior, the parent's approval or disapproval of content, and specific rule making by parents about the amount and kind of television use that they permit.

Parental mediation efforts have been conceptualized as the extent of critical comments about behaviors witnessed on television (active mediation), setting rules about how much, when, and which types of television can be viewed (restrictive mediation), and the presence of parents during children's television viewing (coviewing; Nathanson, 2001a). Active mediation may take place while the child is viewing with a parent; for example, “Do you think the toy is really as big as it looks on TV?” Restrictive mediation frequently occurs in nonviewing moments: “You are not allowed to watch that program; it's too violent.”

Research exploring the impact of active and restrictive mediation has found that it can decrease aggressive behavior (Nathanson, 2001a), improve children's comprehension of television, foster refined consumer behavior, and develop critical thinking about television's representation of the real world (Desmond, Singer, Singer, Calam, & Colimore, 1985).

Children whose parents set rules about television viewing (restrictive mediation) exhibit higher reading scores than do unregulated viewers (Roberts, Bachen, Hornby, & Hernandez-Ramos, 1984), tend to be more skeptical about television reality (Desmond et al., 1985), are less likely to ask for products advertised on television, and are less physically aggressive (Nathanson, 2001a). Not all mediation is positive, however, in that if children perceive parents' mere coviewing as parental endorsement of content, they [Page 1083]may behave aggressively after watching an aggressive wrestling program or a violent cartoon (Desmond, Singer, & Singer, 1990). Passive coviewing may also lead to the belief that television characters are representative of real-life people.

Both survey research and direct observation have been used to investigate how frequently parents actually mediate television content. While direct observations in the home suggest that active mediation occurs less than 5% of the time, surveys indicate greater frequency when parents self-report or when children corroborate parents' estimates. Nathanson (2001b) found that parental mediation is strongly related to parental attitudes about TV content, with parents who dislike violent content reporting more restrictive mediation. There is some evidence that use of the network's parental advisory system and family mediation occurs most frequently in families with gifted or high-achieving children who watch small or moderate amounts of TV, producing what some investigators in the area have labeled the “preaching to the choir” effect.

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