Changes in Children’s Contact with TV in the First Three Years of Life
May 2006
How do television, videos, video games, and other image media that penetrate deeply into children’s everyday lives affect their physical and mental growth? This question is attracting considerable attention and creating a wide range of discussions.
The NHK Broadcasting Culture Research Institute has been conducting a joint project “The Better Broadcasting for Children” with other researchers since 2002 to study the reality of children’s contact with media, targeting about 1200 children born in Kawasaki city in 2002. The project is a long-term research series, which started when the children were twelve month old and continuously monitors them as they grow up.
So far, we have completed three rounds of research and analyses on young children for their first three years of life (i.e. children aged zero, one, and two.) The most significant change during their infancy is that the hours when “TV in the child’s room is on (without the child watching it)” decrease and children start actually “watching” television as they grow up. About 80% of mothers of one-year-olds think, “My child has started understanding the content,” and more than half of mothers of two-year-olds think, “In general, my child now knows programs they want to watch.” As for well-watched programs, children less than 2 years old rarely watch programs other than NHK Education channel’s children’s programs, but the share of children who watch commercial TV’s animation programs increases among two-year-olds. This tendency is more obvious for those who have older siblings. 50% of the mothers of those who have started “watching TV,” have started supervising over programs the child should watch as well as the viewing hours. These results indicate mothers gradually become concerned about television’s influence on their children. 90% of the two-year-olds “like watching videos” and their video-viewing hours have increased. On the contrary, 87% of the two-year-olds “have never played with video games.”