Analysis And Revelation On The Effect Of Media On Parent-Child Interaction

In the first two or three years, young children develop significantly. As the most key role in early childhood, the relationship between parents and child is the first social relationship, and parent-child interaction is the primary issue, which directly contributes to their healthy growth and positive development in the whole life. With rapid progress of technology, media has come into common people and become a necessary part of young child’s normal activities. Therefore, it is impossible to keep media from young child, the important issue is whether media could improve parent-child interaction in such a critical period and media as the third-part serve relationship between parents and children and development of early childhood. With these questions, this study will be implemented from three aspects:First, this study investigated the relationship between media and parent-child interaction by reviewing studies and research on young child’s media learning and relationship between media and parent-child interaction.Second, to understand current situation of young children’s media life, this study collected materials through questionnaire survey towards twelve parents of12months child and twelve parents of18months child. The result indicated that young children in city got in touch with media early and they had some time to watch TV program and DVD. And most parents approved beneficial role of media on young children’s development, but the lack of their awareness of initiating interaction with child still exists. At the same time, an observation of viewing parent-child normal activities at home was conducted for drawing present situation and characteristics of parent-child interaction in daily life.Third, the purpose of this study is to explore how the media as third-part serves parent-child interaction improvement. Thus, according to psychological development characteristics of young children, this study focused on interactive elements of media and asked participants to watch two different typical cartoon films, Smart Tiger is rich in interactive content and Baby Einstein is lack of it. The analysis comparing parent-child behaviors under these two different situations suggested that video with abundant interactive elements promotes quality and quantity of parent-child interaction indeed in both watching period and free play period later, the level of interactions is greater viewing of Smart Tiger than with Baby Einstein. Besides, this study introduced Sesame with western culture characteristics. The analysis comparing parent-child behaviors of watching three different videos suggested that cultural differences in video affect quality of parent-child interaction as well, which results from that unfamiliar feeling for foreign culture leads to decline of interaction.At last, as the basis of the series of research before, this study made a conclusion that how media improve parent-child interaction, continuely considered essential factors of outstanding video program and not only provided advantageous reference points for media designers and makers but also gave suggestions for parents to take advantage of media reasonably and improve quality of interaction effectively.