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A recent study (Warren, 2001) at the University of Arkansas shows that the most
involved parents, not the most restrictive, best regulate their children’s television usage.
The study concludes that parents should endeavor to watch television with their children
since young children cannot process all the material they absorb from television.
Parent-child co-viewing has become salient in recent studies on mediation of the
impact of television. Despite the amount of research done on adult participation in
children’s television viewing, the results are still inconclusive. What is more, most of
these studies were conducted in the West and few attempts have been made to examine
the same issue in a different cultural context, where not only the television programs but
also the audience are different.
In the absence of their own research data, there is a tendency among social
commentators in Asian countries to extrapolate the findings of Western studies to the
situations in their own countries regardless of the applicability. Thus it would be
illuminating to conduct the same kind of research in the context of Asian societies, which
would help to cast light on children’s television viewing experiences in a different
culture. As a step towards that direction, this study examined the effect of parent-child
co-viewing of television on children’s cognitive development in the context of China.
China boasts one of the largest young television audiences in the world. It is also
unique in the sense that its children tend to get more attention from their parents,
especially in the area of education. Because of the one-child policy pursued by China for
the past two decades as a measure to control its population, children in China, who are
known as the “little emperors and empresses” tend to receive more attention from their
parents. Parents tend to spend more time with their children, including the time when
Convention