Growing Up with Media

About this chapter

Growing Up with Media examines how today's children — labelled 'digital natives' — spend nearly seven hours a day on television, computers, cell phones and other electronic devices, and asks what this constant media exposure does to their mental, emotional and social well-being. The chapter opens with children's actual use of media (gaming, YouTube, social posting), maps benefits for younger children (literacy, numeracy, social skills), older children (critical thinking, family values, creativity) and adolescents (career information, online etiquettes), then turns critical. It analyses gender stereotypes on television programmes, in advertising and in the depiction of children and adolescents. It explains how media shapes the social world through sex, violence, obesity, poor school performance, cyber bullying, digiphrenia and body-image disorders, using nine Indian case studies (Ashie, Aditya, Sonia, Rohan, Swati, Sanjeev, Anitta, Shama). It closes with the role of teachers and parents — co-viewing, media literacy, in-service training, and the 'third eye' for behaviour change. For CTET Paper I, this chapter feeds questions on socialisation agencies, Vygotsky's socio-cultural theory and ZPD applied to digital media, gender stereotyping, child-protection issues like cyber bullying, and the teacher's pedagogic response. The four tests — Practice 15, Quiz 15, Hard 15, Mastery 30 — cover all six topic groups at CTET depth.