Love or Comprehension? Exploring Strategies for Children’s Prosocial Media Effects

Abstract

Given children’s difficulty comprehending prosocial narratives, we examined strategies to bypass comprehension (affiliative priming) and reduce cognitive burden (simplified lessons, adult scaffolding). In Study 1, one hundred seven 3- to 5-year-olds watched a prosocial narrative (helping vs. waiting) with affective primes (loving vs. funny) or a control narrative. Comprehension was low and behavioral outcomes were unaffected by lesson or prime. In Study 2, sixty-four 3- to 5-year-olds watched shorter stimuli (1-minute song videos) about loving or helping others. Those in the helping condition helped more, but the loving condition did not differ from a no-exposure control. In Study 3, 636 parents of 2- to 10-year-olds were surveyed about a time their child showed prosocial responses to media. Over 70% recalled an instance, a third of which involved songs. Reported response duration was positively predicted by family discussions after exposure (rather than at the time), including explicating the lessons and giving timely reminders/praise.

Non-random acts of kindness: Joint music making increases preschoolers’ helping and sharing with an adult

“…Notably, many of the programs examined feature music as a key didactic element (e.g., Barney, Sesame Street ). More recent work utilizing 1-min song videos from Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood showed that brief exposure to a helping song increased children’s spontaneous helping, although more naturalistic exposure to longer content segments did not (Mares, Bonus, & Peebles, 2018). None of these studies specifically involved singing along with the musical stimuli, although some children may have done so.…”

How I wonder what you are: Children's songs as a source of mental and internal state information

“…Mares et al. (2018) also found that exposing children to a song video about helping enhanced the likelihood that they engaged in helping behavior.…”

“…The authors suggest that their findings are at odds with the argument that reciting nursery rhymes is a shallow educational practice that only leads to encoding of surface material. Mares et al (2018) also found that exposing children to a song video about helping enhanced the likelihood that they engaged in helping behavior.…”

“…Moreover, children's songs could foster social and emotional competence as they often present simple narratives with characters that express a variety of feelings (Kenney, 2005) and equip children with vocabulary to label different mental states (Mullen, 2017). Importantly, the content within children's songs could guide caregiver‐child conversations, such as parents reiterating or explaining messages conveyed by the lyrics of songs (Mares et al., 2018).…”

ABCs or attack–boom–crash? A longitudinal analysis of associations between media content and the development of problematic media use in early childhood.

“…Thus, prosocial media content is linked to more prosocial behaviors and adaptive emotional strategies (Coyne et al, 2018). One challenge, however, is that very young children often struggle to follow prosocial dialogues (Mares et al, 2022). The potential complexity of some prosocial content may mitigate the potential positive impact of prosocial content on children.…”