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Managing Your Child’S Media Use In Three Easy Steps. It’S

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Managing Your Child’s Media Use in Three Easy Steps
It’s never been easy to be a parent. Today, it’s becoming increasingly more complex as the field of digital technology rapidly expands, leaving parents in a tailspin. A Google search of “kids and technology use” returns over five million results, all of which offer their own two cents about the ideal way to raise children in the digital world. How could anyone possibly navigate his or her way through that? What is one supposed to make of constantly changing information regarding healthy media habits? I’m here to offer three simple steps parents can take to solve the problem of how to use media with your young children. Be educated. Be smart. And don’t be afraid.
The first step--becoming …show more content…

They state that, “Experiences in infancy establish habits of seeking, noticing, and incorporating new and more complex experiences, as well as schemas for categorizing and thinking about experiences” (Hart & Risley, 2003). The paper goes on to explain that children who were exposed to more language and diverse vocabulary themselves expressed more utterances, and utterances that varied in vocabulary use. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand that interacting with children is a positive way to stimulate them cognitively. But this begs the question how should parents interact with the children?
When it comes to interacting with children using media, the definition of positive interactions becomes more ambiguous. This is where the idea of co-viewing comes into play. Co-viewing is just as it seems--watching something with another person or several people. For young children and their parents, co-viewing facilitates the cultivation of shared experiences, ensures comprehension support from parents, and allows parents to monitor the content their children consume. The notion of co-viewing extends far beyond simply sitting next to a child on a couch and passively watching Sesame Beginnings, for example. Co-viewing implies parental engagement with the child and the program. Pointing and saying things like, “look at the piano! We

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