Lapsevanemate roll 5-7aastaste laste meediatarbimise suunamisel
Date
2011
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Tartu Ülikool
Abstract
The aim of this report is to research parental mediation of 5-7 year-old children’s media use. It is important to research parents so we could understand how parents see their part and role of their children media decisions. Through ten interviews we can see how 5-7 year-old children use the media through their mothers and fathers eyes.
There were three main questions for what the research tried to answer:
How parents describe their children’s media usage habits;
What kind of parental mediation parents can see to have themselves through their opinion;
What kind of strategies parents use to guide their children’s media usage.
As a result parents feel that they have an influence for their children and that mostly they have the power to guide their children. Mostly they know what kind of TV-programs and internet games their children watch or play. They claim to say, what kind of media children should use and as a result they know exactly what their children do. Although the program, that kids watch is not always suitable for them.
Even though parents admit that their children watch TV or play behind computer quite a long hours, they do not see the reason for using some special steps or strategies for limiting children media usage.
The reason for this is that they feel that they know what their children are doing in the internet and what they watch from the TV so they do not need any special parental mediation strategy’s at the moment. As children grow they watch what kind of rules they should use or what kind of parental mediation to apply.
As parents describe their children media usage, we can see, that they know if the program is not suitable for children but they do not think it is something bad or that it has some bad consequences. Kikas (2008) has pointed out, that things the children see from TV or internet has a great physiological and psychological impact for their understandings.
Parents see their role as being part of development of children media usage and media interest. They want to guide and supervise their children to understand what kind of show is good for a kid. Parents want to feel needed and important – being part of their children development. But as a result there can be said that parents feel their role in their children’s media usage but they do not know how to be fully part of it.