Nikolaus von Hofacker
The first years of life
In the course of complex early childhood
development processes the Teletubbies can be a help
and fun for young children.
In the last 30
years television has become an integral part of the everyday experience
of children in industrial nations (Bachmair and Hofmann, 1998).
In the meantime the television consumption of pre-school and primary
school children amounts to 1 - 3 hours (Report on Television, 1998;
Hassler et al, 1993). It is not my intention at this point to discuss
or report in detail on the extensive investigations carried out
in various countries on the effects of excessive television consumption
on children's development, as this would go beyond the scope of
this article. No standpoint, however ideological, can deny that
nowadays children, sooner or later, inevitably come into contact
with the medium of television. I should therefore like to concentrate
on the following questions and try to answer them from the point
of view of a doctor and psychiatrist specialising in the clinical
treatment of children and adolescents:
- What significance
does this "sooner or later" of the contact with television have
for pre-school children? Under what conditions are negative effects
on the child's development to be expected from premature or excessive
consumption of television at a pre-school age?
- What can be
demanded of a sensible contact with the medium of television at
a pre-school age?
Development processes
in the first years of life
The young child, in the first years of its
life, undergoes an especially intensive development process, whose
most salient features include the close intertwining of motor, cognitive
and socio-emotional learning processes with the quality of parent-child
interaction and relationship. Development in this phase of life
proceeds first and foremost in the context of the child-parent relationship.
Of the manifold development processes it is in particular the need
to explore the environment that has to be emphasised and which can
best take place against the background of a secure bonding with
a parent. Of special significance in this connection are reliable
so-called contingency experiences in dealing with the environment.
By contingency experience we understand the child's inherent interest
in establishing relationships between what it does itself and the
effects which these actions have on the animate and inanimate environment.
Contingency experiences allow the child to experience causality
and create relationships. The younger the child is, the closer the
temporal connection has to be between what the child does and the
consequences of its actions in order to be experienced "contingently":
the time between stimulus and response in a baby and a young child
amount to no more than 0.5-1 second for the relationship to be experienced
between both as contingent (Papousek and Papousek, 1994). Of special
significance for the young child are contingent learning experiences
which occur in social interaction with an attachment figure, in
everyday dialogues with an adult while playing, when a story is
being read to the child, in the setting of a conversation and suchlike,
ie against the background of a social-emotional experience.
Development in the pre-school period involves
coping with a number of very complex development tasks. These include
the young child's growing ability to regulate himself, that means,
for example, the ability to calm himself down, to maintain growing
phases of attention as well as the development of empathy and pro-social
behaviour patterns in the second year of life, and finally the development
of gender identity and social behaviour patterns in interaction
with children of the same age in the 3rd year of life.
Development conditions in the
first years of life
Ideally the young child grows up in a context
in which one or both parents have sufficient time to respond to
its behavioural needs sensitively and appropriately, but at the
same time, where necessary, also to be able to set limits and thus
support the child in its various development needs as best they
can. Such a "development scope" means for the child that during
play it can gather everyday experiences which entail the integration
of a large number of complex and different stimuli through different
sensory channels: by jumping into a puddle and feeling the cold
water on its hands; going to the crawling group and on the way perceiving
the various smells and sounds, for example, of nature, of people,
of the traffic etc. Later pro-social and social behaviour will be
tried out in the kindergarten group. In this way the child's own
position in the exchange and interaction with and inside its age
group regulates itself. There is no substitute for the diversity
of these real-life everyday experiences.
There is no substitute
for real-life everyday experiences
Now it has to be asked, however, what priority
such ideally typical opportunities for experience still have nowadays
in a society in which one in 5 children in the eastern part and
one in 10 in the west and generally every 4th to 5th
child in large cities lives below the poverty line, ie in a family
dependent on social security. A large number of these children grow
up with only one parent, usually the mother, who, if she is not
dependent on social security, has to go out to work. In this case
who can take on the difficult work of bringing up and creating a
relationship? It is, as everybody knows, television – highly appreciated
by children for a long time - that steps into this vacuum with a
vengeance. If for the moment we disregard those programme-makers
who are only interested in recruiting ever younger age groups for
television, sensible programme producers try, in some cases not
without justification, to offer help. In the everyday reality of
children from disadvantaged families, in which the interactions
at home are characterised by the strains of unemployment, the excessive
demands made on a lone parent, the parents' psychological stress,
alcohol or drug abuse or lastly by experiences of neglect and violence,
the Teletubbies soon become a better babysitter, a superior
educator and mediator for experiencing the environment in a manner
appropriate to the child's age. The increasing neglect of children
in these helpless and overtaxed families can no less be denied than
the neglect of the prosperity of those children who are carted from
one ballet appointment to the next music lesson and from there to
riding lessons – a miscalculation impressively described by Christiane
Graf in her book Ende der Spielzeit (The End of Playtime).
Here educationally valuable television programmes – and the Teletubbies
can with certain reservations be included among these (see below)
– offer a "normality" which is no longer available to these children
in their world.
The television set as
babysitter and teacher
By arguing that there are in the meantime
programmes that are certainly educationally useful even for two-year-olds
a justification is created which is readily used by many parents
who precisely on account of their being chronically overtaxed have
to struggle with constant feelings of guilt and a bad conscience
in order not only to simply park their children in front of the
television set but also at the same time to do "something good"
for them. Here it should not be overlooked that the educational
demands of school are forging further ahead into the pre-school
area and thus into an age in which the young child actually ought
to have a chance to learn in quite a different way from that later
on at school, namely by playing, by trial and error and without
any pressure or demands to perform, on the side, as it were, and
without any specific aim or purpose. Many a young child is prepared
for school from the cradle, and television tries increasingly to
take on an important role in this function of paving the way. The
idea of preparing children for learning at an early age has led
to the development of the concept of "readiness to learn", in whose
wider environment the Teletubbies, too, in the end were created
(Home, 1998).
But what happens when a two-year-old watches
the Teletubbies at half past eight on a Saturday morning?
At this time mummy and/or daddy are still in bed or preparing breakfast,
if they aren't already at work and glad they are not being pestered
by a niggling, whining little brat. However, nowadays even two-year-old
children have no difficulty in handling the remote control of a
television set and so quickly land, for example, in Bravo TV
running at the same time on a private channel or in the first news
broadcast with live war reports and a bit later in doctors series
with disturbing pictures from the emergency room of a large hospital.
The world of the Teletubbies, easy to understand and assimilate,
is in this way soon replaced by emotionally charged, constantly
changing pictures that completely overtax the capacity of the young
child to perceive and assimilate what it sees.
The Teletubbies and early
viewing – benefits, risks and side-effects
At this point there is no intention of disputing
that programmes like the Teletubbies can by all means be
of an educational benefit to children who cannot experience their
environment in accordance with their age. Much time and know-how
has been invested in the development of the programmes; the structure
and course of the series does justice to children's processes of
perceiving and assimilating in many respects. The individual instalments
of the series are funny, often witty, and always varied and entertaining.
Especially successful is the music, too, which in its agogics, rhythm
and melody is well adapted to the contents of the story. This complies
with the baby's and infant's ability, as described by Stern, to
perceive transmodally, ie to simultaneously link up series of stimuli
that are different, but similar, in their dynamics (Stern, 1985).
On the other hand, it is doubtful what the
benefit or incentive is supposed to be of the characters' much criticised
"baby language" in which infants' melodic voice patterns are imitated
by adults in a completely inappropriate way and individual words
are spoken deliberately wrong as if the speaker suffered from dyslaly,
ie a speech defect (eg haro instead of hallo). One can critically
ask whether all the ideas really do come from children, as the producers
emphasise, or whether, given the technical nature of the characters,
the children's perception is not meant to be guided in a certain
direction at an early age. Equally exaggerated is the claim expressed
in the ARD/ZDF Children's Channel's press release that the series
stimulates the imagination, demands that children have their own
experience and is interactive. This can at best apply to children
from an extremely deprived background. The Teletubbies are
certainly not interactive in the sense that children, as described
above, can have the so important contingent environmental experiences
– even if one child or another does react to the actions, statements
etc. The television set remains a lifeless machine. And yet infants
are taken in by precisely this illusion that the machine with the
moving pictures is a live person facing them. From their inability
to distinguish between direct reality and media reality, two- to
three-year-olds try to talk and communicate with the turned-on television
set or the figures they see, but they do not receive any contingent
reactions. Experiencing a pseudo- or non-contingency quickly has
an annoying effect on children at this age and in the end cannot
be integrated into their world of experience.
The television set remains
a lifeless machine
Apart from the positive effects of limited
television consumption on the development of language and intelligence
and on learning performance in childhood (Anderson et al, 1985;
Anderson, 1998; Neumann and Charlton, 1990), in recent years precisely
the negative consequences of consuming television at too early an
age or excessively in childhood have been pointed out. One of these
is the risk of developing obesity - which in the meantime has been
clearly proven scientifically – from inadequate physical exercise
to compensate for the passivity of consuming television (Locard
et al, 1992; Dietz, 1993). Chronic restlessness/hyperactivity, states
of anxiety, partial weaknesses in performance, depressive and/or
aggressive moods, violent impulses breaking through, disorders in
rhythms of being asleep and awake and a number of other psychological
symptoms (Miller, 1996; Strasburger, 1997) have been repeatedly
described, but they are not yet clearly provable on account of the
complexity of the conditions under which they arise. There are also
indications that watching television impairs perseverance and tenacity
when solving difficult problems (see Böhme-Dürr, 1999).
It certainly has to be borne in mind that excessive television consumption
frequently takes place in psycho-socially strained families and
thus in connection with a number of further psychological risk-constellations
for the child's development. For this reason it is difficult – and
so far not researched adequately enough – to find out what special
role excessive television consumption can play in the origin of
psychological disorders at pre-school and school age.
Recommendations
The data available on the question of the
extent to which infants in industrial nations have contact with
the media in general and television in particular are a cause of
such concern that the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has felt
it was its duty to repeatedly give its opinion on the subject of
the "child and television" since the mid-nineties. In its latest
statement in August 1999 it makes a number of concrete recommendations
on how doctors dealing with children and adolescents can educate
parents and families on the consequences of excessive television
consumption in childhood and on the critical use of the media. Here
they strongly warn against allowing children under the age of two
to watch television at all. They backed this up with recent studies
on the maturing of the child's brain which prove that infants require
sufficient direct experiences of interaction with parents and other
important attachment persons for a healthy maturity of the brain
and the development of appropriate social, emotional and cognitive
skills.
In the light of the recommendations of the
AAP and also the suggestions of Millner, 1996, and Barthelmes, 1999,
I regard it as useful to proceed in the following way:
- In view of the special features of the
developmental conditions in the first years of life, watching
television under two years, better still under 3 years, cannot
be advocated.
- Watching television "on the side" should
be avoided, as the complexity of various stimuli overtaxes the
child's capacity to handle these stimuli.
- As far as possible children should only
watch television in the presence of adults, and thus have a chance
to talk to adults about what they have seen. On no account should
television be used as a babysitter.
- Children should be prevented from having
a free choice of programmes, from zapping about indiscriminately.
Ideally children's programmes should be viewed, selected and recorded
on video by parents beforehand. This allows the child to stop
the film at any time, to talk to the parents about it and also
to see parts of the programme again to improve the integration
of experiences.
- Television consumption should be graded
by age and at pre-school age be restricted, for example, to 30
minutes a day.
- Media education begins in the family by
parents offering their children role models in a critical and
limited use of the medium of television.
- The child should be offered extensive
alternative opportunities for experiences to watching television.
- The child's room should, as far as possible,
be free of electronic media.
- In its latest statement the AAP gives
tips on how parents can be enabled to handle television and other
media critically and competently.
- When the television set becomes a better
educator in disadvantaged families or those under strain, it has
to be asked what society can contribute in order to offer here
a better support for development than the media. Any contribution
to improving the reconciliation of family and work is also a contribution
to improving the child's opportunities for experiences, and thus
an improvement in the alternatives to excessive media consumption,
particularly in families under socio-psychological strain.
Assuming these recommendations are heeded,
viewing the Teletubbies at a pre-school age is certainly
not harmful in any way, but can, on the contrary, be thoroughly
entertaining. An infant who occasionally watches the Teletubbies
with his parents in the course of a normal day, but additionally
has a large number of other experiences with his parents, siblings
and/or other children in different situations will not suffer any
negative consequences from such restricted viewing. Yet in an educational
context of this kind watching television is not essential.
I should therefore, in conclusion, not like
to appear to be warning against the end of the world resulting from
pre-school viewing along the lines "For heavens sake not the Teletubbies",
but by all means to point out the deleterious consequences of excessive
television consumption at an early age and thus to cautiously counteract
the "Teletubby mania" that is currently setting in throughout Germany.
Early and excessive television consumption is all the more far-reaching
in its consequences if it occurs with other unfavourable conditions
of development. Watching television then quickly becomes a "gateway
drug" for a lifelong attachment, not to say addiction, to the medium.
This should be pointed out as a warning.
REFERENCES:
- American Academy of Pediatrics (Ed).
(1999). Media Education. In: Pediatrics, Vol. 104, pp.
341-343.
- Anderson, D.R. (1998). Kinderfernsehen und Schulleistung. In:
TelevIZIon, Vol. 11, No. 2, pp. 21-24.
- Anderson, D.R., Field, D.E., Collins, P.A., Lorch, E.P. and
Nathan J. (1985). Estimates of young children’s time with television:
a methodological comparison of parent reports with time-lapse
video home observations. In Child Development, Vol. 56,
No. 5, pp. 1345-1357.
- Bachmair, B.; Hofmann, O. (1998). Lernen mit dem Kinderfernsehen:
Wunsch oder Wirklichkeit? In TelevIZIon, Vol. 11, No. 2,
pp. 4-20.
- Barthelmes, J. (1999). Fernsehen und Computern in der Familie.
Für einen kreativen Umgang mit den Medien. München:
Kösel Verlag
- Böhme-Dürr, K. (1999). Bildmagnet Fernsehen. In TelevIZIon,
Vol. 12, No. 1, pp. 20-25.
- Dietz, W.H. (1993). Television, obesity, and eating disorders.
In Adolescent Medicine. State of the Art Reviews, Vol.
4, pp. 607-622.
- Grefe, C. (1995). Ende der Spielzeit. Reinbek b. Hamburg:
Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag.
- Hassler, F., Gierow, G.; Tilch, P. and Langemann; I. ( 1993).
Das Fernsehverhalten einer kinder- und jugendpsychiatrischen Inanspruchnahmepopulation.
In Pädiatrie und Grenzgebiete, Vol. 31, pp. 363-369.
- Home, A (1998). Mit "Tönnchen" lernen: die Teletubbies.
In TelevIZIon , Vol. 11, No. 2, pp. 24-28.
- Locard, E., Mamelle, N., Billette, A., Miginiac, M., Munoz,
F. and Rey, S.( 1992). Risk factors of obesity in a five year-old
population. Parental versus environmental factors. In International
Journal of Obesity and Related Metabolic Disorders, Vol. 16,
pp. 721-729.
- Millner, M. (1996). Das Beta-Kind. Fernsehen und kindliche
Entwicklung aus kinderpsychiatrischer Sicht. Bern: Hans Huber
Verlag.
- Neumann, K. and Charlton, M.( 1990). Spracherwerb und Mediengebrauch.
Tübingen: Narr Verlag.
- Papousek, H. and Papousek, M. (1994). Intuitive parenting. In
Bornstein, M. H. (Ed.), Handbook of parenting. Vol. 2:
Ecology and biology of parenting. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum.
- Nielsen Media Research (1998). Report on television. New York,
N.Y.
- Steren, D. (1985). The interpersonal world of the infant.
New York, N.Y.: Basic books.
- Strasburger, V.C. (1997). "Sex, drugs, rock’n roll"
and the media: are the media responsible for adolescent behavior?
In Adolescent Medicine: State of the Art Reviews, Vol.
8, pp. 403-414.
AUTHOR
Nikolaus von Hofacker, MD, is head of the
Psychosomatics Treatment Unit for Children and Adolescents at
the Municipal Infirmary in Munich-Harlaching.
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