As a parent and creator of electronic media for preschool children, I ‘d like to encourage parents to explore the wealth of material available to them these days. It is always a thrill for me to hear parents talk about how much their children enjoy my work. But even better is being with kids while they are watching. I recently had that experience with a preschool class of seven two-year-olds. They started giggling at a humorous sound effect when the letters of the alphabet bounced onto the screen. This didn’t stop…and continued for all 26 letters. Everyone in the room was laughing too, their excitement was so infectious.

1. Be picky. My advise to parents is be selective. There is an amazing assortment of very high quality media available.
2. Preview. Review the material before you children see it to make sure you know what they will be seeing. Unrealistic you say, then look for media that has been reviewed and received awards or certification, ie iParenting Media Award and/or KidsFirst.org.
3. Watch it with them. There will be lots of questions and you want to be there to help answer those questions. I love introducing very young kids to animals or objects they probably don’t know like yaks, armadillos and sturgeon. That can lead to great discussions.
4. Use it for skill building. Interact with the programming and use it to build skill sets like colors, numbers, shapes, comparisons, etc. It’s the best of both worlds for them, they get your attention and stimulating media all at one time.
5. Keep TV time limited. Sometimes it’s hard to do, but worth the effort to help kids learn to entertain themselves, be active outdoors or just coloring or looking at books.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 10th, 2007 at 11:25 am and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.