Thanks to Melissa Watcher for sharing this research article about parental mediation strategies and violent news. All too timely!
I found it interesting that restrictive mediation was not helpful in reducing fear. This has mostly been my strategy and will continue to be with my 2 youngest. It occurs to me, however, that it may backfire with older children like my son because just because you don't allow access to the news doesn't mean they won't hear about something scary from someone else. If you don't even know they've heard about it, you have no chance to reassure them. Very interesting.
http://crx.sagepub.com/content/34/2/212.full.pdf+html
I’m surprised that age was a weaker factor than they expected it to be in this study. In a way, this suggests that parents have to multitask with different developmental strategies if they have several kids in different age groups. From the findings, it seems like both the older and younger children would be frightened by the scary event, but different aspects of it would scare them (and therefore could only be calmed down by different strategies). This is added work for the parent considering that their children could stumble across coverage while on mediums that aren’t traditional news sources, such as Twitter or Facebook. If I were a parent, I’d probably try to be hyper sensitive to any new signs of anxiety that my children might display that would indicate they had accidently come across a scary photo or video about a recent shooting or bombing.
ReplyDeleteKelsey Selig
ReplyDeleteI also find it interesting but not surprising that restrictive mediation was not helpful in reducing fear. This is the method that my mother used with me as a child and I find myself to be more fearful than most other people. I think that not being exposed to these incidents and having them explained makes them seem even more real and likely to happen. Whenever I was accidentally exposed to news media it seemed to be violent and was frightening to me because it was so unfamiliar. While it is instinctive for parents to want to protect their children, it is important to use active mediation to explain things to them and clarify the ways of the world.