It's hard to take children's television seriously. Sociologists dismiss it as an electronic babysitter, while many exhausted parents just say "Put a movie on so we can get some rest." Barney's repetitive songs and the constant explosions of the Transformers look like the bookends of a vast wasteland of images played before slack-jawed media consumers.
I thought exactly that before starting to watch children's TV and movies with Helena Iara, my three year old daughter. Clearly, there are major problems with kids' media, but something else, something much more interesting, is also going on. As I watch TV and movies with kids, I have seen that they use these narratives, characters, and songs to think their world, to give a frame and a meaning to their experiences. The TV or computer screen isn't so much an electronic babysitter as a kind of digital picture frame, a way of teaching what is worth looking at and thinking about.
I studied philosophy. My wife is an anthropologist. As you can imagine, the tools I'll use to think about kidvid come from those disciplines. I hope, though, that I'll also be able to capture something of the way that Helena watches movies and videos, creating a kind of dialogue-within-the-blog with a very little viewer. I hope it can serve as a resource for other adults who want the TV to be something more than just a way to keep the kids out of their hair so they have time -- finally -- to clean the bathroom or cook dinner.
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