What according to the writer are the consequences of growing up with a television ?
Answers
Prosocial and educational benefits
Studies from the early 1970s have shown that children imitate prosocial behaviour. These imitated behaviours included altruism, helping, delay of gratification, and high standards of performance when children are exposed to models exhibiting these behaviours. Friedrich and Stein provided evidence that children learned prosocial content of the television programmes and were able to generalise that learning to a number of real life situations.9 In addition, they were also able to show that prosocial programmes increased helping behaviour in situations similar to and different from those shown on television.
With the initiation of Sesame Street, an American educational television programme for children over the age of 3 years, extensive research was performed.10 Many studies showed that children who watched the most learned the most. A two year longitudinal study assessing the impact of viewingSesame Street on the vocabulary of 3 and 5 year old children showed that viewing predicted significantly improved vocabulary scores on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test. Another study done in the early 1990s showed that children in Turkey who viewed the Turkish version of the programme Susam Sokagi, showed substantial pre- to post-test gains in overall knowledge.