Children's Awareness of Television's Prosocial Fare

Abstract

This study examines the parental disciplinary practices under which children's awareness of prosocial TV portrayals are likely to be maximized and minimized. Two types of enduring parental styles of discipline—induction and sensitization—were extracted from the literature on children's moral development and applied to social learning from television. Data were gathered from a field survey that employed mother-child pairs. Results indicate that children of parents who are primarily inductive had a greater awareness of television's prosocial fare and demonstrated a greater propensity for prosocial solutions to conflict than did children whose parents were primarily sensitizing. These findings are significant in regard to the increasing body of research on the social intervention of the relationship between children and television.