The relation between parental mediation in television viewing and the aggressiveness of children

Many studies in the literature show that children who watch TV more exhibit more aggressive behavior than the children that watch less. Besides this issue, the question whether co-viewing with parents has an impact or not on children exhibiting aggressive behavior should also be discussed. Although there are some researches on various types of parental mediation in watching TV in the literature, role of mediation in children?s learning from TV and its impact on their behavior have been examined in a limited number of studies. Accordingly, this study aims to investigate the relation between the mediation of parents in TV watching and the aggressive behavior of children.Parental mediation in TV watching is examined under three categories in the literature: ?active? mediation, ?restrictive? mediation and ?co-viewing?. Active mediation could be explained as talking with children about the content of programs on TV, discussing the reality level of the programs, critically interpreting the behavior viewed on the TV and providing complementary information about the content of TV programs. Restrictive mediation, on the other hand, includes setting up rules about which kinds of programs could be watched, when and for how long. Co-viewing is simply parents watching TV with their children. However, parents watching TV with their children does not mean that there is an active communication between the parents and children while watching TV. Rather, it means the parents and the child (children) being in the same room and watching the same program on TV. Parental mediation in watching TV is defined accordingly under the same three categories in this study.This study, which is qualitative in nature, investigates the relation between mediation of parents? in TV watching and the aggressive behavior of children in terms of active and restrictive mediation, and co-viewing.First of all, the parents and the students to be investigated in the study were tried to be detected. In this sense, the study was limited to 6 years old children and their parents. Because children of this age are considered to be at ?pre-operational? period according to the literature and their abstract perception skills are not fully developed yet. Therefore, children of this age could confuse the fiction on TV with reality and they could reflect this confusion on their daily lives. In other words, children of this age are considered to be in a period of being highly affected by the contents of TV programs. As a consequence of their age these children are mostly students at nursery classes of primary schools. Accordingly, nursery class students of a primary school in Central Anatolia region were taken into scope of this study. The main condition in detecting the school and selecting the students was the education level of parents, so as to say highly educated parents. After detecting the school, a survey was conducted with the parents of all students at the two nursery classes in order to determine the research participants. With the survey questionnaire consisting of 12 questions, it was tried to assess the mediation types and levels of parents in watching TV. According to the findings of the survey, one student and his/her parents were detected for ?low?, ?medium? and ?high? levels of each type of mediation. At the second stage of the research, face-to-face interviews were conducted with the parents of these students. These semi-structured interviews were consisting of five main questions. After finishing the interviews, the behavior of the previously detected children were observed during their free playing time at school. Observation data related to the aggressive behavior of children were classified under two categories as aggressive behavior learned from the TV and other aggressive behavior. Recorded interviews and observations then transcribed with respect to qualitative research procedures. The reliability and credibility of the transcriptions were checked by two experts.Research findings reveal that aggressive behavior of children could be associated with all three kinds of parental mediation in watching TV. Active mediation in watching TV helps the children in distinguishing fictions from reality and learning socially acceptable behavior. As restrictive behavior put constraining rules on what to watch on TV, the children could not watch aggressive and violent behavior on TV. When the reason of this restriction is explained to the children, it is possible to say the children get still less affected by the aggressive behavior on TV even when they are exposed to this kind of TV content. In the co-viewing situation, as the parents and the children do not speak with each other, children might think that any program their parents watch with on TV is ?good? and might ?legitimatimize? the content of programs they watch with their parents, and they could reflect the content of TV programs on their behavior.On the other hand, when the findings of the survey, the interviews and the observations are taken together, opinions, statements and exercises of parents about TV watching habits of their children seem to conflict with each other. It appears that the children watch TV more than their parents think or assert, and thus are exposed to the contents of TV programs more. Besides, parents? claims about their mediation type in watching TV are seem to be quite different than the real exercise.Research findings show that when the parents really control their children?s TV watching habits and communicate with them in a real sense, the level of negative impact of TV content on children might decrease.