07 April 2008
Helping Parents Protect, Educate Kids about Media
The 2007 Media Smart Award winner, Kelly Mendoza, presented her findings (MP3, 45MB) to an audience of education and cable leaders in March. Her paper Mapping Parental Mediation and Making Connections with Media Literacy, provides insight on how media literacy can strengthen and improve effective parental mediation.
Mediation is defined as any strategy parents use to control, supervise or interpret media for children. Parental mediation, described as one of the most effective ways of managing television’s influence on children, helps children to think about the use of media and the messages they receive in order to highlight positive aspects of media, but also to intervene in media’s potential negative effects.
“Effective intervention of parents with their children’s media consumption in the home may strengthen children’s skills in thinking more deeply about media messages they receive,” said the study’s author Kelly Mendoza. “Parental mediation informs children about television’s importance or lack of importance, how it should be used, and how much attention or disregard they should give to the material.”
Dr. Renee Hobbs, professor at Temple University, and Anna Weselak, immediate past national president of the PTA also commented during the presentation.
Mediation is defined as any strategy parents use to control, supervise or interpret media for children. Parental mediation, described as one of the most effective ways of managing television’s influence on children, helps children to think about the use of media and the messages they receive in order to highlight positive aspects of media, but also to intervene in media’s potential negative effects.
“Effective intervention of parents with their children’s media consumption in the home may strengthen children’s skills in thinking more deeply about media messages they receive,” said the study’s author Kelly Mendoza. “Parental mediation informs children about television’s importance or lack of importance, how it should be used, and how much attention or disregard they should give to the material.”
Dr. Renee Hobbs, professor at Temple University, and Anna Weselak, immediate past national president of the PTA also commented during the presentation.
Cable in the Classroom
