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1 E102 Week One ‘Understanding Childhood’

Chapters/Online Study/Assignment: Online Study Week 1 Week Commencing: 05/10/2020 Activities to Complete: Understanding childhood online activities 1-10 Learning Journal: Part 1 Learning outcomes When you have completed this study material, you should be able to:  outline some of the ways in which knowledge about children and childhood can be framed within childhood studies and child psychology  describe the differences between academic perspectives and everyday ‘common-sense’ views on childhood  reflect on how language is used across different types of texts  recognise the importance of suspending your own judgements and considering alternative views  reflect on your prior learning, and your skills and expectations for the module. 1 Reflections on childhood E102 introduces a range of disciplines and perspectives on the lives of children and young people, including the academic perspectives of psychology, sociology and anthropology. However, it is important that you don’t see these academic disciplines as completely different from, or alien to, your own ideas about children and their lives. This section asks you to consider your own experience views about childhood, what influences a child growing up in today’s world, and what problems this may generate. We have all been children, and most of us as adults have at least some contact with children. Yet children’s lives today may in some ways be very different from the childhood you experienced. Part of your task will be to reflect on this. Activity 1 Identifying important topics in childhood Take a few moments to reflect on your own childhood, your current views of childhoods, or what you have read, heard or seen in the media about children’s lives. Can you identify five or six examples of what, in your view, are important topics relating to children and their lives?       

whether or not babies should be given dummies or comforters whether mothers should return to work following the birth of their children whether primary school children should have mobile phones the effect of television and video games on children the prevalence and effects of child abuse of various kinds whether children should do paid work the quality of schooling, and inequalities of access to it.

1.1 Discussing childhood Newspapers and other media often report issues affecting the lives of children and young people, and often present these in quite sensationalist ways. For example, it

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is declared that ‘too much screen-time is bad for children’ or that there is ‘an epidemic of obesity in children in the UK’. But how true are these headline statements? In your studies for E102, you will need to consider such statements and find academic evidence to help you evaluate the claims and make informed judgements on them. One of the key skills you will develop is the ability to suspend your judgement on certain topics until you have found academic material to help guide your decisions and inform your understanding, which can often be tricky to do. Very often our initial, common-sense views about the lives of children are derived from what we read, see or hear in the media, which can be a very useful source of evidence. In the activities that follow, you will be looking at two newspaper articles about children and television, and asking yourself whether allowing children to watch too much television really is damaging to their health. Activity 2 Is too much TV a bad thing? Before we look at the newspaper articles in detail, spend a few moments thinking. In your view, is watching a lot of television bad for children? Why do you think this? Write a few sentences in the box below. We will come back to look at your response a little later in the activity. Just thinking about what we read in newspapers and see in the news, an initial reaction could well be that watching too much television is harmful to children. A different opinion may be that television can be educational. Your answer will depend on your own views and opinions. Keep your opinion in mind as you work through the activities that follow. 1.2 Taking a closer look Activity 3 Finding the main points of an article Read through the extract below, which is from a blog in the Guardian newspaper, looking into the ‘effects of screen time on mental health’. Consider the content of this extract and then carry out the tasks below. Ban under-threes from watching television, says study Doctors should curb amount of time children spend watching television to prevent long-term harm, say paediatricians Doctors and government health officials should set limits, as they do for alcohol, on the amount of time children spend watching screens – and under-threes should be kept away from the television altogether, according to a paper in an influential medical journal published on Tuesday. A review of the evidence in the Archives Of Disease in Childhood says children’s obsession with TV, computers and screen games is causing developmental damage

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as well as long-term physical harm. Doctors at the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, which co-owns the journal with the British Medical Journal group, say they are concerned. Guidelines in the US, Canada and Australia already urge limits on children’s screen time, but there are none yet in Britain. The review was written by psychologist Dr Aric Sigman, author of a book on the subject, following a speech he gave to the RCPCH’s annual conference. On average, he says, a British teenager spends six hours a day looking at screens at home – not including any time at school. In North America, it is nearer eight hours. But, says Sigman, negative effects on health kick in after about two hours of sitting still, with increased long-term risks of obesity and heart problems. The critical time for brain growth is the first three years of life, he says. That is when babies and small children need to interact with their parents, eye to eye, and not with a screen. Prof Mitch Blair, officer for health promotion at the college, said: ‘Whether it’s mobile phones, games consoles, TVs or laptops, advances in technology mean children are exposed to screens for longer amounts of time than ever before. We are becoming increasingly concerned, as are paediatricians in several other countries, as to how this affects the rapidly developing brain in children and young people.’ (Boseley, 2012) 1. Write a short sentence in the box below, which captures the main focus of discussion. Try to summarise in your own words what you feel the article is about. Your answer should not be longer than one or two sentences. The article is saying that children watch too much television and that this damages their health. Researchers sometimes include policy recommendations that they argue arise from their work. In this case the recommendation is reported as ‘Doctors and government health officials should set limits, as they do for alcohol, on the amount of time children spend watching screens – and under-threes should be kept away from the television altogether’. 2. Now read through the extract again and think about how it has been written. What language does it use, and who is the article written for? You will have noticed that the article is designed for the general public, so it uses quite simple language and short sentences, and presents facts in quite an entertaining and accessible way. Although newspaper articles may appear accessible and simply written, they are always based on opinion and facts.

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3. In this article, the writer makes a claim and then presents the evidence to support it. Let us consider how this is done in a little more detail. As you look through the extract once more, this time think about: a.the claim that is being made b.the evidence the writer uses to support it. Using the highlight function identify in yellow the claim that is being made, and, in green, the two pieces of evidence being used to support it. 4. How convincing do you find the claim being made in the extract? Why should we believe the evidence provided? You may find the article’s claim convincing because it includes quotes from academics, such as Dr Sigman and Professor Blair, who seem to have a good understanding of the effect of television on children. Very often as we read material, we tend to look out for the key messages within the writing and try to identify evidence that helps us to understand the topic in more detail – in this case, whether too much television really is bad for young children. 5. Having read the extract, and considered how the claims and evidence are outlined, write a short paragraph of no more than four sentences outlining your own views on this topic. Write this in your own words. This gives you the opportunity to use the extract as a starting point for generating your own writing on the topic. The following paragraph presents an opinion on the topic, one that is quite similar to that of the psychologist mentioned in the newspaper article: Children are exposed to too much television and this seems to have clear effects on their health. Children often become lazy by sitting in front of a television screen and this could lead to obesity, problems in sleeping at night and health or developmental problems during childhood. Children should really not be allowed to watch more than two hours of television a day because this could lead to more serious health problems in childhood. This paragraph takes the view that exposure to television is a bad thing, and it uses some of the evidence outlined above to discuss this issue in the writer’s own words. You may also notice that the writer has included his or her own evidence which wasn’t mentioned in the original text (e.g. sleep and developmental problems). The topic could have been written about in many different ways, but often the starting point is identifying the evidence we think is important as we read material. 1.3 Considering the evidence

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Often we need to look at evidence so as to help us make judgements about what we read in the news. Now let us consider another newspaper report, which offers a different opinion on the subject of children and television. Activity 4 Another point of view The extract below is also from a blog post in the Guardian newspaper, looking into the ‘effects of screen time on mental health’. Again, it is designed for the general public, so it is relatively straightforward, though it does include some academic concepts and language as well. To begin with, read the text quite quickly, to try to get a gist of what it is saying. What do we really know about the effects of screen time on mental health? A recent briefing from Public Health England warns that too much screen time is causing emotional problems in children. But is it that simple? Public Health England this week announced that too much time in front of TV and computer screens is causing increasing psychological problems, such as depression and anxiety, in children. The report … suggests that the amount of time spent playing computer games was negatively associated with wellbeing in children – in other words, their general mental and physical health, resilience and the extent to which they are happy or worry about different aspects of their lives. The effects, particularly on mental health, were most pronounced for those children who spent more than four hours a day using some sort of screen-based technology. While this sounds all doom and gloom, there are some caveats that need to be taken into account. The briefing was released to coincide with the Change4life campaign, and isn’t a piece of peer-reviewed, scientific research. In its discussion of screen time, it cites data from other reports, for example, commissioned for the Department of Health that are themselves secondary analyses of existing data sets, such as the Millennium Cohort Study. If you have a read of these reports, it’s really difficult to get a sense of what they did and didn’t control for in looking at the effects of playing video games or watching TV. … So it’s a shame when you see headlines such as the Independent’s ‘Overload of screen time causes depression in children’, or the Daily Mail’s ‘TV is making children unhappy’ – the study didn’t say anything like this at all. But what do we actually know about the effects of screen time on childhood development? It’s actually a really tough question to answer, in part because ‘screen time’ is a pretty rubbish concept. It takes into account the use of anything that has a screen – TVs, mobile phones, games consoles and tablets. … With this issue in mind, what does recent scientific evidence in this area look like? In March, researchers at the Public Health Sciences Unit in Glasgow published data

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that also came from the Millennium Cohort Study (although it wasn’t cited in the PHE briefing), which looked at whether watching TV or playing video games at age 5 was associated with behavioural or psychological problems at age 7. They controlled for a large number of factors that could potentially impact on their results – things like health, family socioeconomic status, frequency of parent–child activities, and a measure of chaos in the household. … Obviously, one study doesn’t tell the whole story – for instance, we know that the amount of time spent watching TV is linked to poorer physical health. But we also know that there is – or should be – a distinction between passive and active screen time. Along these lines, a systematic review from 2010 pointed out that active video games actually promote light-to-moderate physical activity in children. As it stands though, research into the long-term effects of screen time is still relatively young, so we don’t yet know what effects playing video games, using computers, or watching TV has on childhood development. … (Etchells, 2013) 1. Having read this article quickly, what do you think is its main point? What is the writer trying to say? You only need to write a few sentences. The first paragraph is saying that too much screen time may damage children’s mental health. The last two paragraphs are saying that we don’t know whether too much screen time really is damaging to young children. 2. Now look again at the second paragraph. What evidence is the writer referring to in this paragraph? Only one sentence is needed. The briefing uses evidence contained in formal reports from the ‘Department of Health’ and the ‘Millennium Cohort Study’. 3. Why should we not just accept the claims? What’s wrong with the evidence being used? You only need to write three or four sentences below. It says the briefing ‘isn’t a piece of peer-reviewed, scientific research’, and the data from the reports that it cites are difficult to interpret. Note that ‘peer-reviewed’ research is research that is published in academic publications after being reviewed by specialists in the academic community. 4. How convincing now do you find the argument about too much television being bad for children’s health? Have your views changed? Why? Write three or four sentences below.

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In this activity, you have seen how newspaper articles can present information and evidence in a fairly simple and accessible way. Yet often we need to take care in interpreting them, and look to academic evidence to see whether the problem represents a serious issue or whether it is a moral panic. To do this, you may need to suspend your judgement until you have considered the evidence and alternative views on the topic. You can use these skills to investigate other current topics that interest you, such as childhood obesity, video gaming or other topics that make newspaper headlines....