According to many wellness experts, watching too much TV can negatively affect the wellbeing of your children and adolescents as it can lead to violent or aggressive behaviour, obesity, and decreased school performance. However, as TV is here to stay, surely there’s a way you can utilise its power to improve family wellness.
Researchers at Vanderbilt University researchers have discovered that when you watch and actively participate with certain television programmes along with your children, you can boost their vocabulary and comprehension skills. The findings came from Peabody College researcher Gabrielle Strouse, who saw that parents naturally enhance storybook reading by stopping and asking their child questions throughout the book, and theorised that the same might be achievable though television.
To test her hypothesis, Strouse provided 81 parents of three-year-olds with DVDs of children’s stories to watch over a period of four weeks. Before and after the study, researchers tested the children on vocabulary words from the stories and on story comprehension. One group of parents were trained to prompt their kids to become an active participant in telling the story, using the dialogic reading method. Another group of parents watched the videos with their child and commented on the content, but did not ask questions. The third group just sat their child down to watch the stories with little or no interaction, and the fourth group had an actress, rather than parents, use dialogic-style questions.
The results were that the children of the first group scored significantly higher on vocabulary and comprehension than all other groups, especially the groups where the parents provided little interaction with the kids. Strouse noted that having the same method done by an actress scored better than those without interaction, but ‘it doesn’t take the place of parent-led discussion’.
According to Asociate Professor of Psychology Georgene Troseth, added that young children need help to get anything from any source: ‘Don’t give them a steady diet of flopping in front of the television and thinking that is going to somehow educate them.’ Instead, make sure the environment is non-threatening and favours learning. Talk about on-screen subtleties that occur during the story that may have significant meaning later, and explain unfamiliar words that may be spoken. Finally, ask your child questions about what he or she thinks or how they might use the story’s lessons in their own lives.
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