Attention and Intensity of Play as a Function of Television Exposure in Very Young Children

Play behavior is an important component of early childhood. Play allows children to explore the world around them, experience new functionalities and acquire major skills (Ginsburg, 2007; Piaget, 1951 as cited in Courage & Setliff, 2010; Power, 2000). At the same time, infants and toddlers are surrounded by electronic screen media. Research has shown that very young children, even when they are only a few months old, watch television on a fairly regular basis (Courage, Murphy, Goulding, & Setliff, 2010; Vandewater et al., 2007). Given the evidence for the significance of play in very young children’s life and the considerable time spent with television, the question arises whether television exposure may affect young children’s play behavior. This study will adopt a differentiating approach, in the sense that it will distinguish between foreground and background television, and between solitary play and joint play. Based on Cohen’s attention-getting and attention-holding principles (Cohen, 1972), the first objective of this study is to explore whether television has an effect on the attention of children at play. More specifically, we might expect that background television could get the attention of young children at play, whereas foreground television could both get and hold their attention. The second objective of this study is to investigate whether television has an impact on the intensity of children’s play behavior. As research has shown that television interferes with children’s behavior, and play behavior in particular, this study sought to expand this evidence by exploring whether television disturbs children’s intensity of play. We might expect play to be more often diffuse when television is on compared to when television is off. In addition, it could be expected that foreground television would have a more profound effect on children’s play than background television. Home observations of 26 infants aged 9 months to 5 years were carried out to explore the impact of television exposure on play behavior. Log-linear analyses and post-hoc chi-square tests were conducted to explore how television and play interact. This study reveals that television exposure, especially foreground television programming, has an impact on children’s play behavior. Results indicate that background television gets children’s attention to the screen during play, while foreground television programming both gets and holds the attention of children at play. Log-linear analyses revealed that television exposure both directly and indirectly affects the intensity of children’s play. When television is on, children are more than twice as likely to play in a diffuse way. In addition, children are almost twice as likely to engage in solitary play when television is on, which in turn is associated with almost twice as much diffuse play. In situations where children are exposed to foreground television programming, children’s play behavior is almost three times more likely to be diffuse compared to situations where they are exposed to background television. This study supports the importance to distinguish between foreground and background television. First, this study confirms that both background and foreground television compete for children’s attention while they are engaged in play behavior. However, while both background and foreground television succeed in getting children’s attention to the screen, the impact of foreground television is more far-reaching. In fact, in our study, background television was never effective in holding the attention to the screen while children were at play, whereas foreground programming in some instances did receive full attention. Second, the impact of television on children’s play is different when television programming is foreground compared to when television programming is background. When television programming is foreground, children’s play behavior is almost three times more likely to be diffuse compared to situations where television programming is background. However, the results of this study show that foreground programming as well as background programming turn children’s play behavior to be diffuse. With respect to background television, this may be explained by the fact that background television draws children’s attention away from their play onto the television, whereby the play behavior becomes diffuse. With respect to foreground television, it seems possible that these findings are due to both the attention-getting and attention-holding potential. This explains why foreground television is more often associated with diffuse play: foreground television gets the attention of children, whereby attention is drawn away from their play onto the screen; additionally, foreground television holds the attention to the screen, whereby children experience difficulties to resume their play behavior.status: publishe