Interview with Peggy Orenstein

Had an invigorating conversation with Peggy Orenstein about her book Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture.

My notes about it as well as the audio and a transcript are  HERE

New Teachers: An opportunity lost – and found?

We need the perspectives of new and experienced teachers collaborating about media use among young children and the adults in their environments.

Link to the post

New Post – on the website

Hello,

The Healthy Media Choices Blog has returned to its home on the Healthy Media Choices Website

You’ll find the archive and new posts there.

Resolved: To listen

I’m not one for New Year’s resolutions.  Those of us who feel each new day is a beginning don’t generally get the importance of the turning of the year, or birthdays, for that matter.  But, reading Darren Rowse’s Blog on Keeping content flowing (from 2/2009) on Problogger  at www.problogger.net , I decided to get organized this year.  After all, I have all the necessary elements: I love to write, am passionate about media and children and there is no lack of material on which to ponder and opine.

Where to begin?  Trying to listen.  Listen carefully to what I hear on the street, in friends’ homes, on trains – wherever – from children.  One such overheard tidbit was published in the NY Times Metropolitan Diary http://is.gd/68KHZ (scroll down).  I already have a mug from a previous submission, hoping for another.

In any event, listening is where the interest begins, but of course, the interest has to be there before I bother to listen. So, it is something of a conundrum.

Listening has reminded me of one of the most important things for anyone who gives workshops and presents to the public: don’t assume you know about other people, their lives and values.  I’ll give you an example:  I was on the subway just before Christmas and a woman was standing over her little girl, who was about five years old.  Neither of them had a hat or gloves. Here is how the conversation went (my inner reactions/dialogue in italics)

Girl:  I want to make the brownies.

Mother:  T.J.’s has great brownies.  We could get some and go to Al’s.

Girl:  I want to make the brownies

Mother:  But making them means mixing it in a bowl, waiting for them to bake and cool, then cutting and packing them.  It takes a lot of time.  It’s a lot of work.

Girl:  I want to make them.

Me: Make the brownies with the kid, you lazy thing.

Mother: You want to go to Al’s, right?

Girl: Yes

Mother: Then, we’ll go to T.J.’s for the brownies so we can go to Al’s, OK?

Girl: (pauses) OK.

Me: The poor kid, her mother won’t even make brownies with her.

Mother: We’ll have dinner first.

Girl: Where?

Mother: They’re having a special meal at the shelter.

Me: ( silence)

Hasn’t got much to do with media, right?  Not directly, but the listening will bring lots of needed information – about what I don’t know. And may lead  to a kind of impartiality that can really hear people and therefore be in a real relationship to them, one by one.

5 Questions to Ask about On-line Parent/Teacher Resources about Screen-time and 3 Recommendations

Here are five questions to ask when assessing on-line resources for parents and teachers of young children:

Does the site:

• assume that recreation and family time equals screen-time?  Or, does it question that assumption and provide suggestions for other forms of family time?
• look like an advertisement for movies and video games?
• put the recommendations of pediatricians and psychologists front and center and help us work with them?
• give tools that can be adapted to your parent/teacher population or, does it have a one-size-fits-all approach?
• Represent an independent organization or clearly show a connection to the entertainment industry?

3 Recommendations:

Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood www.commercialfreechildhood.org

CCFC is the premier national advocacy organization around the commercialization of childhood.  The opening page lets you know what the latest action is and makes it easy to join that effort.  Headed by Dr. Susan Linn its chief contributors include some of the most prominent experts in the field: Diane Levin, NancyCarlsson-Paige,  Jean Kilbourne and many more. Lots of articles by contributors and other resources

National Institute for Media and the Family:  www.mediawise.org

Headed by Dr. David Walsh, great user-friendly resources for download that address a broad range of questions. Great for finding something for that “Media corner” of the bulletin board.

Center for Media and Child Health www.cmch.tv

Headed by Dr. Michael Rich, a pediatrician who also worked in media, the site is accessible and addresses questions realistically in a thoughtful way.  It is also a treasure-trove for those doing research.  Check out the new innovation: “Ask the Mediatrician”

All three are dense with information and have unique angles on the questions. Check out their links to many other important organizations. Enjoy exploring!

Be well.  Let’s take a break and take a walk.

Serious about Play

Let’s talk about free play: problem solving and imaginative experimentation.  Did you notice the words after the colon in the preceding sentence?  That explanatory phrase is one way of addressing a difficulty we face in approaching the subject of play: language.

The word “play” often implies, as www.dictionary.com says: “the opposite of work”.  Can’t be serious then, right?

The Miriam-Webster dictionary defines play as:
“Engaging in an activity for enjoyment or recreation rather than for a serious or useful purpose: the children were playing outside: their friends were playing with their dolls.”

That play is  “purposeless”  – not oriented toward a particular end – allows freedom to experiment and learn some of the very serious lessons of life. It is also the crucial difference between free play and the sports, dance classes and other programmed events that dominate so many young children’s schedules.  It stands in stark contrast, as so many teachers tell me, to the formulaic ways in which children are playing with toys that are related to movies and television shows.

There is a science of play.  Stuart Brown, M.D. Founder of the National Institute for Play, sees play in its evolutionary terms.  He followed the trail of play in animals and humans. He states in his book  Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination and Invigorates the Soul that brain imaging confirms that the period of play in each species is  tied to the size and rate of growth of the cerebellum, which research now shows is responsible for attention, language processing, sensing musical rhythm and more.

We need to get this straight: play is, as Vivian Gussin Paley says in Child’s Work: The Importance of Fantasy Play “the work of childhood”.  We give lip service to children being “our future”, yet we underpay those who provide developmentally appropriate environments for them and undervalue their natural way of learning.  In Crisis in the Kindergarten:A New Report on the Disappearance of Play, the Alliance for Childhood reports:  “New research shows that many kindergartens spend 2 to 3 hours per day instructing and testing children in literacy and math—with only 30 minutes per day or less for play.”

Parents often approach me at workshops with the question: “Will my child be “behind” if we don’t let her have television, computer and video games until after she is eight?”  I answer: “No.  Let her form her own voice until eight or nine and then she can use all the media tools for articulating her own perceptions.”

This view is confirmed by Henry Jenkins, recently retired head of the  MIT Comparative Media Studies Program, and his colleagues in an occasional paper on digital media and learning: Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century, published in June, 2009. The first chapter of that study is “The Needed Skills in the New Media Culture”.  What is number one on the list of skills these MIT researchers, no Luddites, say is necessary to be able to use technology in the future?  “Play: The ability to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem solving.”

New Parents

It’s always a pleasure to give a workshop or presentation for new parents – especially when they bring their new babies along!  The window of opportunity is wide open for forming healthy habits as a family as it is when there’s a new baby is in the home.  It takes a lot of intentional planning to address the needs of a young child without everyone else sacrificing unnecessarily. Healthy Media Choices gives workshops that bring the research and information together in a process to help each household come to a solution uniquely suited to their needs.  Over the next blogs here, we will go in depth about each of these areas.  For now, let’s go over some of the concerns of young parents.

PARENTS’ NEEDS:
RELAXATION
We need “downtime” and, in particular, new mothers need to relax while nursing.  Sometimes, we put on the television. How serious is this?  We know the answer intuitively and the research about braing development supports that sense: less is better. On the other hand, we don’t need guilt – we need to be intentional.  An occasional period of screen time, especially if it is limited from the beginning ” We will watch…..and then turn it off”  is something that is comfortable for many parents.

Some things we need to keep in mind

The American Academy of Pediatrics advises that there be no screen time for children under two. http://www.aap.org/sections/media/toddlerstv.html

Your family is forming habits from the first day and they build with repetition. If you are intentional at the beginning, things can be easier later on.  There are alternatives: treat yourself to a book or magazine that is just for fun, listen to music.
Trading “time off” with another parent can help provided needed breaks.
As the child gets older, there are resources for keeping a child occupied while you put your feet up at sites like TRUCE www.truceteachers.org

COMMUNICATION:
Increasingly, email and social media fill a gap, particularly in the winter, for young parents, especially if they are spending long times at home with a young child. Seeing the parent absorbed for hours by a computer or other screen can have an impact on a young child’s own view of the importance of media.
Making a decision to break “screen time”  at regular intervals (particularly important for those who work on a computer from home) and having one on one time, without mediation, with the child can go a long way toward mitigating those effects.
CIVIC ENGAGEMENT and ADULT ENTERTAINMENT
As adults,  we may feel the need for news and entertainment that is not suitable for our children.  It is necessary to be intentional, to speak to each other in order to collaborate and to use the various recording devices available to watch when our children are not around.
PARENTS’ FEARS:
Some of the concerns expressed are:
•    Isolation – will the child feel lonely?
•    Will the child lack necessary media skills?
•    Body Image
•    Screen addiction
•    PBS – is it any healthier?
•    Anxiety and fear
A COMMON THREAD:
Parents wish for balance and a joyful family life

Resources:  These are the organizations that are the major conduits of information and resources for addressing these concerns.
Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood

www.commercialfreechildhood.org
National Institute on Media and the Family
www.mediawise.org
Packaging Girlhood
www.packaginggirlhood.com
Packaging Boyhood
www.packagingboyhood.com
Alliance for Childhood
www.allianceforchildhood.org

Why do our eyes glaze over?

I’ve noticed that people’s eyes tend to glaze over when I say “Healthy Media Choices” in response to a question about my non-profit.  Once they hear that I don’t tell people what to do, that I simply relay the research and help people see what is possible and desirable -even enjoyable – for their own homes, things lighten up.

There is a growing sense that media’s influence on the young – especially the very young – is something that needs to be addressed, though the avenues and forms for that response vary widely.

The entertainment media industry  wants us to think that this is solely the concern of and responsibility of the parents. While it is true that the “off” button IS the most effective response in the home, what about the billions of dollars being spent by advertisers to navigate past the “gatekeepers” – those diligent parents and teachers?  And, what about the formerly trusted  organizations, like Scholastic, that are bringing thngs like Bratz dolls directly into the schools?  The book distribution systems that put commercial logos, some of which are for junk food, onto library books?

Also, media outlets in all their forms are wonderful tools we all use as adults. We want to help the adults who care for young children learn how to model using those tools, not being manipulated by them. That’s what media literacy is all about: critical thinking about and integration of media.

Please join this important work. Contact us to volunteer or become an intern.

© Healthy Media Choices, Inc.  2009.All rights reserved.