Many parents feel as though they are in a constant battle with their children over television.  From screen time and content restriction to who has authority over the remote, these rules on restriction often vary by households. Growing up, I was not allowed to watch reality television, but my best friend was.  Interestingly enough, she was not permitted to watch cartoons while I was.  Since then, the entertainment industry has grown tremendously, creating programs directed at children (Salway, 2019).

Middle class parents use digital grounding– the process of limiting their child’s screen time– to control when and how long their child can watch television.  Other ways parents digitally ground their children includes taking it away as punishment, censoring the programs, and using other parental controls to to restrict how much their child uses the TV (Auxier, 2023).  How do parents decide what their kids can watch?  Is television restriction a personal decision or is it rooted in social class?

Restricting TV Time: Middle Class Culture

Parents have implemented digital grounding since the first decades of commercial television.  In the 1960s, the average time children from different socioeconomic families spent in front of the television differed greatly.  Unlike most middle and upper class parents who felt that television led to the neglect of other activities, only 16% of lower-class parents agreed with this statement (Blood, 1961).

Today, this discussion has grown more complex due to the increase of educational programs on television.  Yet, middle and upper class children still watch between 21%-27% less television than do children in lower classes (Salway, 2019). 

Middle class families are more likely to sign their children up for talent building activities because they want to carefully cultivate their child’s skills. This parenting style is referred to as “concerted cultivation”.  A child’s schedule is saturated with activities like club sports and music lessons, leaving minimal time that parents would need to turn to the television to keep their child occupied (Lareau 2003).  Parents also tend to create rules like enforcing bedtimes, which further limits their child’s ability to watch television (Goode, 2019).  Middle class children spend 4-6 hours less watching television than low class children because of their full schedules and family television rules (Mollborn, 2022). 

Lower Class Parents’ Use of TV as a Babysitter

The strategy of using television in place of a babysitter has become increasingly prominent throughout the past decade (Nikken, 2022).  Parents in lower income families are less likely to feel as though their child is neglecting an activity when they watch television because, oftentimes, they are not (Evans, 2011).  Extracurriculars like sports practices or music lessons can be an expensive investment so parents in lower income homes do not sign their child up for them (Lareau, 2003).  As a result, when parents in lower income homes need time away from their child, they will use the television as a distraction. Here, the television takes on the role of a babysitter as it keeps the child absorbed in the content of the show, allowing the parent to complete work or other responsibilities.  The use of television as a babysitter has become a part of lower class subculture in that it saves parents both time and money hiring a babysitter would require (Evans, 2011).

An Education Tool…or a Deleterious Influence?

For low-income children whose parents cannot afford to sign them up for summer camps or tutors, television is often the next best thing (Evans, 2011).  Channels such as PBS Kids are designed to broadcast programs that teach children basic skills like counting, spelling and object identification (Calvert, 2003).  After age 2 or 3, children have the ability to absorb the information they see on television, so these programs can be beneficial for a child’s cognitive development (Oster, 2023).

However, if parents do not stay actively engaged with the remote, their child can easily control the channel, giving them access to all regularly scheduled programs, even ones that are rated R (Auxier, 2020).  Since lower class parents are more likely to use the television as a babysitter, their children are then more susceptible to absorbing potentially harmful content.  When children are exposed to adult shows, they can absorb the information and are more likely to adopt similar traits, further reinforcing behavioral stereotypes targeted at children of low income families like aggression and inappropriate language (Oster, 2023).  In the click of a button, a television station can be switched from teaching the colors of the rainbow to showing graphic crime scenes of a rated R detective show.

For many middle and upper class parents, the program in question is a determining factor in regulating television.  Even if programs are targeted at young audiences, some parents feel as though not all of them are necessarily appropriate for their child to be watching and label them as being either “good” or “bad” (Mollborn, 2022).

Middle and upper class parents are even more inclined to ignore pediatric recommendations of 1-2 hours daily if their child is absorbing educational content.  Parents believe that educational shows are “good” because their child can learn and benefit from watching the show (Mollborn, 2022).  Additionally, they make exceptions in their restrictions for “special programs” like allowing their children to stay up past their bedtime (Evans, 2011).  Such special programs might range from the production of an educational film to a championship sports game like the Super Bowl.

Middle class parents view shows that don’t provide educational interactions or contain violent scenes as “bad” and “addicting” and censor their children from them.  They argue that these non-educational programs are deleterious for extracurricular activities and for their child’s development.  Many parents feel threatened by the remote, because unless they are actively sitting with and monitoring their children and the television, they fear that their child will be exposed to language and content that is violent and not age appropriate for them (Mollborn, 2022).  The labeling of certain programs as “good” and “bad” is another tactic middle and upper class parents use to restrict certain TV programs.

The Culture Behind Television Restriction

There is no doubt that television use saturates many families.  Such trends in television restriction rely heavily among parenting strategies. The stratification of television trends among social classes have become cultural in a sense as they perpetuate information and exposure inequalities (Oster, 2023). To label television as a main symbol of class stratification would be an exaggeration, however such tendencies for parents’ ambivalence do seem to be swayed by pecuniary factors.

REFERENCES

Auxier, Brooke, Monica Andreson, Andrew Perran, Erica Turner. 2020. “Parenting Children in the Age of Screens.” Pew Research Center. July 28. Accessed March 7, 2023. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2020/07/28/parenting-children-in-the-age-of-screens/.

Blood Jr., Robert O. 1961. “Social Class and Family Control of Television Viewing.” American Sociological Review 28(5): 717-724.

Calvert, Sandra L,  Kotler Jennifer A. 2003. “Lessons from children’s television: The impact of the Children’s Television Act on children’s learning.” Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology. 24(3): 275-335.

Evans, Courtney A., Amy B. Jordan, Jennifer Horner. 2011. “Only Two Hours? A Qualitative Student of the Challenges Parents Perceive…” Journal of Family Issues. Accessed March 26, 2023. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/epdf/10.1177/0192513X11400558.

Goode, Joshua A., Paula Fomby, Stephanie Mollborn, Aubrey Limburg. 2019. “Children’s Technology Time in Two US Cohorts.” Child Ind Res (13): 1107-1132.

Lareau, Annette. 2003. “Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life.” University of California Press.

Nikken, Peter. 2022. “The touch-screen generation: Trends in Dutch parents’ perceptions of young children’s media use from 2012-2018” Communications. 47(2): 286-306. Accessed March 26, 2023. https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/commun-2020-0028/html?lang=en#MLA. 

Mollborn, Stefanie, Aubrey Limburg, Jennifer Pace, Paula Fomby. 2022. “Family Socioeconomic Status and Children’s Screen Time.” Journal of Marriage and Family.

Oster, Emily. 2023. “Q and A: R-Rated Movies, Adderall, and More.” Accessed March 7, 2023. https://www.parentdata.org/p/q-and-a-r-rated-movies-adderall-in.

Positive Parenting Solutions. n.d. “Children Watching TV: What Parents Need to Know.” Accessed March 7, 2023. https://www.positiveparentingsolutions.com/parenting/children-watching-tv.

Salway, RE, Emm-Collison L, Sebire S, Thompson J, Jago R. 2019. “Associations between socioeconomic position and changes…” BMJ Journals.  Accessed March 26, 2023. https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/9/12/e027481.citation-tools.