Media Literacy Begins at Home

Continued from page 1

By Henry Jenkins

December 5, 2003

To intervene effectively, parents need to know what media their kids are consuming and why. Parents should spend time watching shows, playing games, listening to music, and scanning the Web with their children. As parents do so, they should model active engagement-asking the child to predict what is going to happen next, helping her to understand how one event is connected to previous and subsequent developments, and discussing what each event means for the characters. (Just don't do it sitting next to me in a movie theater, please!) Do not be too frustrated if the child's attentions wander. Kids younger than five or six tend to watch media in short spurts, rather than processing entire stories. VCRs, TiVos, and DVD players support such viewing practices, allowing kids to skip over the dull bits and zero in on the most meaningful segments. And parents shouldn't be afraid to hit the pause key themselves occasionally if it seems that the child has missed something important.

The relationship between new media and the family has been disproportionately shaped by the debates about video game violence, which again focus on media "effects" rather than media uses. Within this framework, all forms of violent or disturbing content are inappropriate for children. Yet, many parents realize that working through emotional issues via fiction may be a way of lowering tensions, allowing parents to communicate with children about things they fear, and helping them to bring those scary thoughts under their symbolic control. It's no accident, after all, that much of children's literature deals with the death of a parent or other loved one-fear of abandonment is something that many children confront. The same principle should apply to other media kids consume-including at least the milder forms of media violence, which can be used as an opening to help kids thinking through alternative ways of dealing with their own aggressive feelings.