Author’s practical guidance
What a three-year-old actually understood
Source named in the book: research on young children and television comprehension (Anderson)
A child can watch a whole story attentively and come away with something quite unlike the story.
Say this now
“Why did she do that, do you think?”
Asks for the join, which is the part they skip.
“And then it was all right in the end.”
Supplies the resolution they may not have kept.
Do this
- Ask about why once during or just after, in ordinary conversation.
- Supply the ending yourself if the scary part is what they took away.
- Expect the surface, not the message, and do not correct them much.
- Listen to their retelling.
- Choose stories with simple joins — a plot a three-year-old can follow is doing more work.
Avoid this
- Assuming they got the moral. They got the loud bit and the funny bit.
- "You watched it, you know what happened." Watching and following are different things.
- Quizzing them afterwards. It turns the show into a test and tells you little.
If it repeats
If they keep returning to one moment out of a story, that is the piece that landed without its context. Tell them the rest of it in your own words, in the daytime, and expect to do it more than once.
Why the book suggests this
A child can watch a whole story attentively and come away with something quite unlike the story. Small children follow what is happening on the surface far better than they follow why it is happening, and the connection between one scene and the next is the part that goes missing.
They collect the striking moments and lose the thread that joins them, and this is what the research on comprehension at this age keeps describing. It is worth knowing because the frightening bit or the unkind bit can be the piece that survives, sitting on its own without the part of the story that resolved it.
Related prepared situations
What happened next?
From this collection
Same Words: Every Screen
45 prepared situations in this family area.