代写留学生论文Popular Culture -The role of the media in the
Nowadays, the media acts significant role around the world. It has large effects on social life, among different generations. With the development of technology, media involved many forms, just like radio, television, the Internet, social media and so on. In the UK, media has become a typical case which has a long history and indispensable. In addition, it has great influence to distinctive aged people and also affects the relationships of them.
Thus far, this discussion on "The Media and Family Education" has been considered as makeable aspects of this topic: What effects do media have on family inner life and relationships? What impact do media have on young individuals? And how can parents and others take advantage of these media effects on their children?
I would like to think how media affect the fathers and mothers themselves. Especially, I tend to consider the impact of the media on parents about parenting that is the media play a role in supplying information and support to parents about child-rearing. In other side, as we have been considering more the effects of the media on kids, I want to change my focus to the influence of the media on the parents in the British society and culture.
Procedure
Gathered and analyzed data about the role of the media in family education from a variety of sources, including research studies, press reports, and media project samples and descriptions. The reference include such fields as media policy, historical research, communication research, parent education, journalism, publishing, broadcasting, media economics, anthropology, sociology, advertising, and public relations.
Findings
In the past years, there has been a debate about child-rearing in the field of media. Almost every kind of mass media, from presses to broadcastings and the internet, information about education are being directed to parents to a special focus. I undertook a study of the role of the media in family education. Its goal was to pull together existing information, to offer some primary observations in order to take discussion in the future.
It was clearly acknowledged that parents are an important audience for children's media, as monitors and mediators of their children's experience, as the final target of much of the advertising and many of the messages in children's media, and as the family members most likely to experience and influence any media effects on children's behavior. It was further acknowledged that some children's and family programs, such as BBC children in Need, Cbeebies, cbbc, offer powerful models for healthy care giving behavior, and that parents sometimes watching them for aims. The following is a summary of my findings.
Advantages in the Media's Role
In assessing the current state of media attention to parenting, several positive and promising developments emerged. Of these developments, the following four strengths were particularly noteworthy:
Parenting has become a main stream among topics in many print media.
Printed parenting materials have proliferated dramatically in the past two to four decades--books, magazines, newsletters, regional parenting papers, pamphlets, and parenting articles in newspapers. Over 1500 parenting books are estimated to be in print today, representing about 20% of the "psychology" market. Similarly, over 200 magazines are estimated to be devoted to aspects of parenting and family life, not including women's magazines and other more general titles that include significant parenting material. Controlled-circulation, regional parenting papers, typically distributed free to consumers, are now available in almost every major city, and controlled-circulation "baby" magazines, also free to consumers, reach almost every new parent. Child and family beat reporters have become quite common at major daily newspapers, and "child-related" stories are a regular feature of the news landscape. In short, almost every parent, regardless of socioeconomic status, is exposed to printed information about parenting, most repeatedly.
Parenting initiatives within the electronic media are expanding.
In particular, significant growth is occurring in three areas: (1) in public television, where two parenting series ran last year, and at least two others are in development; (2) in cable television, where several parenting and family series are running; and (3) on the internet, where parenting sites are mushrooming. On commercial television and radio, news programming and talk shows include a significant amount of parenting content. Also, public service campaigns often target parents as a key audience--campaigns such as the major "I Am Your Child" initiative, recent initiatives of the Advertising Council, and network initiatives such as NBC's The More You Know.
The demand for media information among parents is substantial and increasing.
By a number of measures, many parents have a high level of interest in information about child-rearing, including information from the mass media, on a broad range of topics. Studies suggest that media are commonly used as sources of parenting information, sometimes as extensively as, or more extensively than, interpersonal sources such as family, clergy, or counselors. Of course, the extent to which particular parents are reached by the media varies profoundly according to a number of important factors, including age, gender, communication skills and style, cultural and language preferences, and economic resources. There are promising examples, however, of efforts to reach harder-to-reach parents, such as newsletters for isolated rural parents (including here in Wisconsin), community mobilization campaigns on African American urban radio stations, and Spanish language public service announcements.
The preponderance of professional opinion, supported by theory and research, is that the media, as part of a complex set of factors, can and do have a significant impact on parents and parenting.
Although little direct research has been done specifically on the effects of the media on parents, inferences can be drawn from theory, related research, and professional experience. Together, they make a strong case that the media--including both informational and entertainment media--have important influences, in conjunction with other forces and strategies, on parents' attitudes and behaviors about child-rearing. The media, in other words, are potentially an important tool in supporting and informing parents.
Disadvantages in the Media's Role
On the other hand, a number of drawbacks seriously undermine the ability of the media to contribute effectively to the well-being of parents and families. Of these drawbacks, four are especially important:
Easily accessible sources of information for the media on parenting topics are scarce and scattered. Contributing in particular to the inaccessibility of information is the fact that researchers and resources related to parenting are embedded in dozens of organizations and disciplines, from psychology to law, from early childhood education to adult education, from medicine to social work and community development. Over 40 professional organizations alone represent parenting researchers and practitioners. For journalists, and even for practitioners working with parents, information is difficult to locate and even more difficult to evaluate.
Parenting advice conveyed by the media is often confusing and conflicting.
Caught in the interaction of economic, intellectual, cultural, and social forces, the only constant in child-rearing advice has been change. For example, broad shifts from permissive to authoritarian approaches have occurred from century to century, and, within the twentieth century, from generation to generation. Within the pendulum swings, advice about specific issues also shifts from source to source, from expert to expert: consider, for instance, recent assertions about the value and the risks of spanking or the value and risks of building children's self-esteem. Amid this fluctuation and controversy, researchers, practitioners, the media, policy makers, advocates, and parents have all been frustrated in their efforts to seek reliable information from each other.
Parents of adolescents receive less information and support from the media than parents of younger children.
This relative inattention to the parenting of adolescents occurs in spite of the fact that adolescents have unique and critical developmental needs, and that failure to meet those needs creates serious risks for adolescents, families, and society. Parents play a critical role in influencing outcomes for teenagers, as recent research has underscored, but they often lack the information and support to do so effectively. Exacerbating the problem are powerful negative images of teenagers in the news and entertainment media; recent research documents a significant tendency for the news and entertainment media to portray adolescents as "troubled teens," plagued by problems of crime, violence, drugs, and bad attitudes. These images are also widespread within the public at large, according to survey data, including parents themselves.
Entertainment television has been largely overlooked as a source of influence on parenting and as a vehicle for supporting and informing parents.
What little is known about the messages about child-rearing that reach parents from entertainment programming is mixed, partly reassuring, partly troubling. Content analyses document what we know anecdotally: entertainment programming, in particular family sitcoms and films, portray dozens of parent-child interactions every hour. While depictions of family life are in many ways positive, concerns are widely shared about such issues as the underrepresentation of many cultural groups; stereotypical portrayals of gender roles; depictions of young children as needing little care and supervision (in part because the children serve largely as "props" for the adult interactions); and the depiction of parents as solving family problems quickly, easily, and in isolation from any support system. Research is urgently needed to analyze further the messages conveyed by entertainment media about parenting and family life, to assess the impact of those messages on parents, and to explore the potential for influencing those messages in positive ways, using initiatives that have been effective in promoting other important social issues, such as immunization and drunk driving.
Conclusion
The stage is set, in other words, to take media initiatives in parenting education to a higher level, one that influences underlying social and parental attitudes, reaches broader audiences, sets priorities around particular social needs, engages in more self-reflection and analysis, taps existing knowledge more effectively, and addresses consciously and comprehensively the critical needs of children, parents, and families. I look forward very much to the discussion, and to working together on these important issues.
Recommendations These weaknesses, while significant, are also windows of opportunity for making significant progress in understanding and strengthening the role of the media in supporting parents. At the heart of the problem are weaknesses in the knowledge base, and a set of concrete steps can be taken to address these weaknesses in cost-effective ways.
The steps involve, first, consolidating findings and building consensus among researchers and practitioners involved in issues of parenting, and second, ensuring that the emerging knowledge is disseminated in careful, extensive, and effective ways. The Harvard Parenting Project therefore recommends in its report two key initiatives:
Strengthen the knowledge base about parenting, in particular by consolidating knowledge and building consensus about key findings.
It is widely agreed that the time has come to bring together leaders from a broad range of disciplinary and cultural perspectives in order to consolidate, integrate, and analyze both research and practical knowledge about parenting.
A key purpose of these efforts would be to identify the areas of agreement that exist within the diversity of cultures and approaches that make up current parenting research and practice in this country. Widespread (albeit never universal) agreement is possible in several areas, according to a number of leading researchers and practitioners. Significant commonalities would be expected to emerge, for example, with respect to some of the central goals that parents and society hold for children and child-rearing, with respect to some of the key roles that children need parents to play in order to meet these goals, and with respect to some of the key resources that parents need from society, as well as the most effective ways to provide them. More diversity, although still some important agreement, would be expected with respect to specific parental strategies for meeting children's needs. The degree of consensus that has been achieved in recent initiatives, such as in the information on early brain development prepared for the "I Am Your Child" Campaign, illustrates the potential for this kind of process.
Such initiatives would take unprecedented steps to clarify the areas of agreement, disagreement, and uncertainty with respect to existing knowledge about parenting. The implications of doing so would be profound for empowering the media, parents, and all those who work with and for parents and families.
Implement comprehensive, integrated communications strategies to disseminate the emerging areas of consolidation and agreement about parenting in ongoing and targeted ways.
Information about the importance of parenting and of particular parenting practices will only be as effective as its dissemination. Carefully planned and executed communications initiatives are needed to ensure that, as it emerges, new information reaches parents, as well as media, advocates, policy makers, and practitioners who work with parents, such as parenting educators, health care providers, early childhood educators, teachers, and mental health providers. A number of characteristics would be important to the success of such initiatives, including their coordination with the many existing media projects that target parents and families.
Within these initiatives, special attention also needs to be paid to the areas in which there are gaps in current media efforts. This can be accomplished by designing and implementing special initiatives to address key issues, including (1) targeting parents who are not effectively reached by current media efforts, including harder-to-reach parents and parents of adolescents; (2) researching more extensively the impact of current messages in both informational and entertainment media, as well as ways to introduce more positive effects, especially in entertainment media; and (3) creating a permanent resource center to make information accessible to the media and others in an ongoing way.
In other words, the report recommends that significant attention be given to the coherence and the accessibility of the knowledge base about parenting, as well as to a few major gaps in the media's attention to parenting and our attention to the media.
Further ResearchThe Harvard Center for Health Communication undertook the study just described in part to clarify the best ways that the Center could contribute to the process of tapping the powerful potential of the media on behalf of parents and families. As a result of our analysis, the Center has now designed projects that follow up on some of the study's key findings, including the need for consolidation and consensus-building about the body of knowledge, and the need for more media attention to the parenting of adolescents. Our goal is also to stimulate and support other initiatives, to have a "ripple effect," and in fact we see indications that this is happening already.
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