Researchers in mass media and autism education found young children who watch “Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood” learn empathy and other school readiness skills.
A child’s first day of school can be scary. So can a visit to the doctor, trying something unfamiliar and meeting new people.
Daniel Tiger can help with that. In fact, with some assistance from parents, Daniel Tiger can help preschool children learn the social and emotional skills needed to be successful in kindergarten, which directly correlates with success later in life. And it starts with watching TV.
Two studies released by Texas Tech University researchers show watching the PBS KIDS show “Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood” from the Fred Rogers Company and the cartoon offspring of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” can help young children learn important social skills. One study focused on parental interaction among largely low-income preschoolers, while another looked at children with autism and whether simply watching the show was enough to change behavior.
The short answer to both is yes, Daniel Tiger helps children. But it’s not that simple.
Eric Rasmussen, an assistant professor of public relations, and his co-authors from the College of Media & Communication and College of Human Sciences found children who watch “Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood” demonstrate greater empathy, recognized emotions better and felt more confident in social interactions than their peers who didn’t watch the show, but only when their parents regularly discussed television content with them.
Essentially, the study showed watching programming designed to teach skills can do so, but not in a vacuum.
“It’s not enough to just plop your kid in front of the TV and hope they’re going to develop these social and emotional skills,” Rasmussen, the study’s lead author, said. “There has to be a certain level of parental involvement in kids’ TV viewing experiences.”
They also found children don’t respond equally to the show. Children younger than 4 years and children from low-income households were more likely to reap the benefits. The researchers theorized older children may already be learning those skills. The same is true for higher-income children, who have greater access to opportunities to develop social skills. Because “Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood” was designed for younger and low-income children, the findings made sense, he said.
Of course, watching “Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood” doesn’t negate the need for parental involvement, which is harder in low-income families due to stress from financial, employment and housing uncertainty, Rasmussen said. There’s no easy fix to that either. However, watching the show can provide openings for conversations and questions children can ask.
“Anything that can be done to support these parents in their efforts to help their kids is what’s needed,” Rasmussen said. “One of those things is having kids watch ‘Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood’ and encouraging them to talk with their parents about what they’re watching.”
The study was published this month in the online edition of Journal of Children and Media and is scheduled to be published in the journal’s January-February print issue.
Autism study
While conducting the first study, Rasmussen and his team also partnered with Wesley Dotson, co-director of the Burkhart Center for Autism Education & Research, to examine how effective exposure to “Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood” was in teaching young children with autism spectrum disorder.
In the pilot study, researchers tested two 5-year-old boys with high-functioning autism. Each was tested on a skill – either trying new foods or stopping play, both difficult tasks for children with autism and around which “Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood” aired an episode – then watch the episode and go back into free play time, where each was tested again.
The results were shocking. Researchers found both boys learned the skills simply from watching the show. They didn’t pick up each skill immediately and they didn’t perform each skill perfectly every time, but they did learn the skill. One boy, who hadn’t tried new foods in months, watched the episode twice and had no problems trying new foods in six consecutive meetings, even without watching the episode again.
“That was really the moment when my jaw dropped and I said ‘Wow. We’ve got something here,’” Dotson, the study’s lead author, said. “I don’t know what it is yet, but there’s something here to understand, because kids with autism who are food selective don’t just walk in one day and try everything that’s put in front of them.”
The study can’t be generalized to all children with autism, given how diverse the community is and how small Dotson’s sample size is. As a pilot study, what it tells autism researchers is the prevailing wisdom that video modeling needs to be specific to a child and needs to be accompanied by instruction from an adult may not be true for all children, which allows both for more research and adds another tool in helping children and families cope with autism.
“Realistically, I don’t believe for a second that you can plop a kid with autism down in front of a TV show and that be the primary means of instruction,” he said. “But it can be really hard to find things that engage a child with autism, and ‘Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood’ does seem to engage kids with autism to a high degree.”
The preliminary findings of this study will be published in Behavior Analysis in Practice. Dotson is still working to replicate his results with a larger sample size.
(Press release from Texas Tech University)