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Entertainment Topics
Media Influence in Your Home
Bad Case of the Gimmees
Understanding the media’s influence on our children and deciding how to handle it is critical for parents today. If your children are still pretty young, you may not have given it much thought yet.
That awareness dawned in our home when our first child, Michele, was 4. Until then, her media consumption had been limited to a steady diet of PBS’s Sesame Street with a small helping of Disney videos. Background music, if any, was “Wee Sing Praise,” or “Animal Alphabet” tapes.
Then it happened. For some reason, maybe during a PBS fund-raising drive, I switched the TV to network cartoons. Within hours, this normally happy, content little girl was demanding sweet cereals I’d never heard of and building a mile-long Christmas wish list. Our family was rudely awakened to the power of commercials.
— Rhonda Handlon
"Media Influence in Your Home" first appeared in Plugged In magazine.
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