What Parents are Saying about TV Today

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ON THE AGENDA

The High Stakes of Stakeholder Engagement: A Plea for Careful Planning from Public Agenda

Alison Kadlec
Feb 1, 2012

This post was written for the 20 community colleges participating in Completion by Design, a five-year Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation initiative that aims to significantly increase completion rates for low-income students under 26. As a “National Assistance partner” for Completion by Design, Public Agenda provides direct assistance to the colleges to help them build capacity for solutions-oriented dialogue among faculty, staff and administration. Here, Public Agenda's Alison Kadlec discusses best practices for authentic internal stakeholder engagement. While the post is geared toward Completion by Design planning teams, the principles are useful for any authentic engagement process.

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You Can't Do It Alone: A New Guide to Creating Sustainable Change in Education Reform

Allison Rizzolo
Jan 24, 2012

Far too often, throughout our work in the education field, we've seen even the most earnest and promising ideas from experts and reformers for improving schools and ramping up student learning met with confusion, anxiety or even anger from teachers, parents, students or community members.

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Press Releases

What Parents are Saying about TV Today

What Parents Are Saying about TV Today

A Report from Public Agenda for the Family Friendly Programming Forum

By Jean Johnson, Senior Vice President

Click here to download the full text of this report (pdf)

In the summer of 2002, Public Agenda conducted a detailed study of more than 1,600 American parents with children between the ages of 5 and 17. The study, underwritten by State Farm Insurance Companies, focused on a preeminent challenge of parenting: how to raise children who grow up to be responsible, honest, humane, and considerate adults. It looked carefully at issues facing today’s families, attempting to gauge both what parents say – and what they actually do – about the task of raising children of good character. This fall, Public Agenda issued a report on the research entitled A Lot Easier Said Than Done: Parents Talk about Raising Children in Today’s America.

It will not surprise anyone who follows contemporary discussions about families and children that the topic of TV came up repeatedly. In focus groups conducted prior to the survey, parents often brought up television before moderators even mentioned it. They typically spoke of TV as a teacher and entertainer, for good or for ill. For many in this generation of media savvy parents, TV is undeniably a comfortable and relaxing old family friend. Yet, the parents also believed that TV has changed in recent years, changed in ways that make it far more problematic for their children and far less comfortable for them.

With the support of the Family Friendly Programming Forum, Public Agenda was able to explore TV issues at some length in our research, and some of the findings are discussed in our overall report on parenting, A Lot Easier Said Than Done. Here, we focus on television in more detail, and using a question- and-answer format, lay out what the research reveals about its role in today’s families.^[1] Not everything we report is new – after all, parents have been saying many of the same things about television for decades. Yet the research offers some surprising insights into how different families handle TV, and it presents a compelling picture of the reality parents face when pundits suggest that they merely turn the TV off.

*The author would like to thank Jackie Vine and Leslie Moye at Public Agenda for their careful, intelligent assistance in the preparation of this paper. She would also like to express her deep appreciation to her colleagues Steve Farkas and Ann Duffett. Their extraordinary skills in public opinion research provided the knowledge that makes this paper possible.

[1] In this report, we draw on responses from a national random telephone survey of 1,607 parents or guardians of children aged 5 to17. The research also included 12 focus groups conducted in communities across the country and a review of other recent surveys focusing on television and entertainment media.

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