Ask the Mediatrician

Meet the Mediatrician!

I am Dr. Michael Rich, the Director of the Center on Media and Child Health at Children's Hospital Boston, Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Public Health. But more importantly, I am a parent, just like many of you. As a former Hollywood filmmaker, I am a lover of media.  But as a pediatrician, I see that media have both positive and negative effects on children's health. 

I'm here as The Mediatrician® to answer your questions about media and health.  It is my goal to provide you with science-based answers and practical solutions that can help the children in your life use media in ways that can enrich their development. What's YOUR question about media? Go ahead and ask! Do you want to add a link to Ask the Mediatrician® to your doctor's office, school, or organization website? Click here for instructions!

CMCH is a non-profit organization supported in part by the American Legion Child Welfare Foundation, Comcast, Google, The Stuart Family Foundation, The Norlien Foundation, Cisco, and other generous donors.

Are reading systems like Tag Junior helpful for toddlers?

Q: My mother-in-law just bought a Tag Junior for my two and a half year old. It feels unnecessary for my son, who already loves books and is learning the alphabet at his own pace through puzzles and songs, etc. Is there any support (beyond that promoted by Leap Frog) for this as a useful tool for children's literacy? I hate to seem ungrateful, but I feel like it's a gateway to more gadgets down the line rather than a real educational device.

 -Timid about TAG, USA

A: Dear Timid,

I don’t know of research that looks at the effectiveness of this kind of program, but I can offer the same advice I might offer for any electronic media: Think of it as a tool, and ask yourself whether it can help accomplish something you’d like to accomplish.

In this case, you’re right that your son doesn’t need a system like this—an electronic stylus that reads letters, words, and sentences aloud from Tag-specific books—in order to learn to read. He is already building important preliteracy skills by having positive experiences with reading, especially when they involve parents. But if you’re looking for a way to engage him in reading for the times when you aren’t able to, for example, this might be a useful tool to help accomplish that goal.

My younger boys used this tool as an extension of (not a replacement for) reading with us—as a way to further explore books they already loved. My kids had a Tag version of The Cat in the Hat, which was already a favorite, and they would use the wand to start making connections between whole words and the way they looked and sounded. They seemed to use it to help with the transition from sounding out to reading whole words, but once they could read on their own, they lost interest in it and moved on to standard books and eBooks.

Even though it can help engage him in reading when you aren’t able to, though, this tool will be far more effective when it is used with you, under your supervision, and with your ongoing dialogue and guidance—so if you do have him use it, make sure to use it with him at times. And remember, of course, that no electronic reading system for kids can take the place of you physically reading and interacting with your son. My advice is to just keep reading with him, with or without this kind of system, and to help him to learn how to read on his own. However he gets there, his sense of mastery will help foster a love of reading that he can carry throughout his life.

Enjoy your media and use them wisely,
The Mediatrician®

 

CMCH Monthly Meet for June: Meet Richard Chalfen

Dear Reader,

Continuing on with 10^th year celebration of the Center on Media and Child Health, we hope you enjoy June's Monthly Meet!

Enjoy your media and use them wisely,
The Mediatrician®

Center on Media and Child Health Monthly Meet

Meet: Richard Chalfen

How long have you been at the Center? 10 years as Senior Scientist at CMCH, and since 1997 (16 years) a member of the VIA research wing.

What do you do at the Center? I'm a specialist in participant visual media research, which in this context means that I help write grants for and analyze video narratives made by adolescent patients in VIA research projects. Since 1998, I’ve co-authored a series of academic articles describing results and applications of these projects. More recently, I’ve been working with staff on issues relating Internet literacy, participation, and safety for young people.

What is one of you current CMCH projects? I'm furthering the concept of “applied visual anthropology” while reworking my earlier notion of a family-issued “cell phone license”, especially in light of ongoing discussions of what it means to earn a driver’s license and hold a gun license.

What is one way you like to use media creativity? I like to put media production in the hands of young people to explore their own models of expression and narratives about “how they look” (both how they appear and how they see) in their own creative ways. I'm interested in how people develop ways of seeing and interpreting what they see. In previous years, I offered an undergraduate course entitled “Anthropology through Feature Films” and a graduate seminar exploring ways to interpret the constructed reality of daytime drama. 

What is one of your favorite movies/TV shows and why? In movies, it's a tie between Being There (1980), from Jerzy Kosinski’s novel of the same title, for its fresh perspective of media’s presence and media socialization in American culture, and ­Krippendorf’s Tribe (1998), for its critique of anthropological representation. In television shows, my favorites are Big Bang Theory, which is great humor about geek sub-culture, and Doc Martin, which shows the anti-bedside manner of an heroic M.D. in the UK.

Are there home school media literacy programs for seven-year-olds?

Q: We are a homeschooling family who has decided to exclude media from our daughters’ lives until they turn 7. Our daughters have never watched TV and have never seen an advertisement, movie, YouTube clip, etc. Our eldest is turning seven in June, and we want to introduce her to media though a media literacy curriculum or activities. Can you direct us towards a quality program?

 ~Looking for Literacy, Carbondale, CO

A: Dear Literacy,

Your impulse to introduce media literacy at the same time that you introduce media is a great one! At whatever age kids start using media, whether it be as a preschooler or a tween, it’s essential for them to learn to think critically about the stories, images, and ideas they see and hear.

And your decision to introduce screen media at age 7 is supported by developmental psychology research which has shown that it is around this age that children develop the cognitive ability to recognize “persuasive intent” – that commercials are trying to get them to buy a product – and to distinguish fantasy from reality in what they see on screen.   As they initiate their screen media use, it is really important that you watch with them, observe how they respond, and discuss the issues that are brought up, teaching, and perhaps more importantly, modeling critical thinking for them.

At this time, I don’t know of any research-based, proven media-literacy curricula for home schooling. Make sure that any program you use focuses on critical thinking and can be applied to all media (like books, video games, magazines, movies, and more). Look here for some ideas:

• CMCH
• Media Power Youth
• Action Coalition for Media Education

Use these sources for educational strategies as you teach them to become literate, prosocial digital citizens. This is not dramatically different than what you are already teaching them, it is just transposed to the digital environment. Although they have not yet been exposed to electronic screens, they are already experienced consumers of media. The books they read, magazines at the grocery store, billboards on the highway, and advertisements emblazoned on their own or their friend’s clothes can be a useful entry point for talking about messages that they will see on screen media. Ask them to identify messages in their environment that are designed to persuade them of something, then ask how they respond to those messages – first immediately, then after they have thought about them for a while. Work with them to deconstruct those messages by asking the 5 key questions of media literacy:

• Who created this message and what did they want it to do?
• What techniques are used to attract your attention?
• What lifestyles, values, and points of view are represented?
• How might different people interpret this message differently?
• What is omitted from this message?

Once your daughters have experience with messages they already know, they will be better prepared to do so with the screen messages they experience in the future.

Enjoy your media and use them wisely,

The Mediatrician®