Very often cartoons and educational videos are shown to the child in order to develop him, give knowledge, teach. But in fact, cartoons do not have such a developing influence, no matter what is written on their packaging! The cartoon is just a rest for the kid, in which the child is passive! Why? Let's hear what child psychologists and educators have to say about this.
What is the main thing in the development of a baby and what will determine his success in life? Memorizing and knowing a lot of facts - the names of geometric bodies and figures, planets, etc.? Or the ability to find similarities and differences, analyze, generalize, establish relationships, the ability to find an original way out of a problem situation, negotiate with partners in a game or communication, organize an environment for yourself, plan your actions, see your mistakes, understand their causes and make adjustments?
Unfortunately, now many people believe that the most important thing is memorizing with the smallest letters, numbers and foreign words, various facts and names of objects in the surrounding world. That is why there are a bunch of so-called "developmental" videos on the network, where a picture is simply shown, for example, a planet, mineral or animal, and this object is called a speaker. And this is where the entire content of the video ends. For example, in an educational video that promises to teach kids to distinguish and name colors correctly, a picture is shown on the screen and a dry, or, conversely, a fake-too-joyful voice of the announcer says: “Red. It's a red apple. " Then a new color is shown and the announcer again, rejoicing at something unknown, says: “And this is orange. Orange orange”, etc., until the list of flowers ends.
Do these videos develop children?
Not. Most often, the kid calls after the speaker the pattern he is accustomed to - "a curved line" or "isosceles triangle" or "Saturn". But try to draw another curved line, on another piece of paper and with a different marker, or lay out a curved string on the ground, and the baby can no longer determine what it is drawn - a curved, straight or broken line. He just mechanically memorized the name of a particular picture! He did not learn to distinguish the main from the secondary, find common and different signs and generalize, transfer the acquired knowledge to new situations in his life! This is dead information that does not in any way affect the development of the baby. Just naming and rote memorization does nothing for the development of a preschooler! In order for knowledge to develop, it must be used in life. And this is possible only in real communication with adults in the family,and not in passive perception of words from the screen!
Let's look at an example with color
Promotional video:
It is much more beneficial for the health and development of the child not to watch such a false-developmental video on the screen with a simple listing of pictures of different colors, but to play with the mother with flowers. At the same time, we start looking for objects of a given color in the room and my mother says: “I found an orange folder. What orange did you find? " The child runs to the shelf, points his finger at the book: "Orange". And then we are looking for everything orange that is at home. And when going for a walk, let's name the colors of the clothes: “What color is the jacket? Pants? Scarf?" etc. and fix the names of the colors that the baby already knows. Or maybe let's play another game - take 4 pencils of different colors and ask the child to guess what color the pencil is in your right hand? After three attempts, check if the child has guessed correctly. There is another option - we will lay out five colored pencils,ask the child to close his eyes and remove one and ask the child: "Which pencil disappeared?" At the same time, the mother will playfully, gently and consistently develop the baby and lead him from naming 4 colors (red, blue, yellow, green) to an increasingly wider range of shades (gray, burgundy, pink, raspberry, scarlet, purple, light green and etc.)
But all these videos with a simple listing and naming of different objects are proudly called "developing". Why?
- The first reason. If you call the video “Pictures for Children. Space”is unattractive. And if you call it “An educational video for clever and clever people on the topic of“space”, this is already very attractive and tempting (I came up with this name myself as an example, so if suddenly such a video really exists, then I did not mean it in my remark).
- The second reason is the lack of expertise in developing video products for babies in Russia.
Therefore, when choosing a developmental video for your baby, you need to focus primarily on its content, and not its name. There are wonderful videos for children that do not call themselves developmental, but at the same time really make a significant contribution to the development of the baby! But today there are not so many of them.
An "educational" cartoon or video program must not give ready-made answers or require memorizing pictures, but on the contrary, encourage the child to ask questions, compare, analyze, show familiar objects from a new point of view, awaken the child's creativity, develop his ability to see one object with different sides! And not to list the pictures drawn.
When choosing an educational cartoon for a child, you also need to take into account the requirements for its plot and design:
- Pictures should not flicker, they should change slowly.
- The speech of the heroes must be intelligible and competent! Moreover, she is competent in words, in the construction of phrases, and in the correct intonation. There is no place for rudeness, because a child absorbs everything like a sponge, and, unlike an adult, a child cannot “filter out” what is “good” and what is “bad” here.
- The cartoon should not have negative models of behavior, aggression (you need to take into account the imitativeness of preschoolers, because they subconsciously begin to apply those behavioral models that they saw in the cartoon)
- The plot and characters of the characters should be understandable to the kid, make him want to play, come up with new adventures and dialogues of characters, etc.
What do you need to know to develop your baby?
The kid learns the world with his hands in an interesting activity with an adult! And this is what will determine his achievements and success in life in the future! Why? Because this is how a child is by nature - he has visual-effective and visual-figurative thinking, unlike us, adults, in whom verbal-logical thinking prevails. Therefore, a baby can cognize an object and build its image only in his practical activity. And this feature of children's thinking has been known for many centuries and must be taken into account by all adults in teaching kids!
Really determine the development of a child in preschool age:
- Lively, meaningful, interesting, creative communication in the family.
- Sensory experience (i.e. experiences gained through touch, smell, hearing, vision in real life).
A preschooler needs to play, draw, sculpt, design, listen to reading good books, stage them with his mother, conduct experiments with air and water, build his hypotheses and test them, draw conclusions. That is, for the development of the baby, it is necessary that he himself make experiments, and not watch cartoons where these experiments are shown. He needs to make crafts from acorns himself, and not watch a video about how others do it! And you yourself have to invent and make crafts from cones, and not play a computer game in which you only need to poke with a mouse in the right place and assemble a virtual craft from cones using a model. The child's thinking is at the tips of his fingers, but the fingers holding a real bump and coming up with a craft out of it! And not fingers "poking" with the mouse in the place indicated by the arrow on the computer screen!
Watching videos and cartoons is not a practical activity for a child. In them, the child is passive. This means that video and TV can be used as recreation, as an addition to truly children's activities, but not as the main content of life, education and training of a baby and knowledge of the world. And it is necessary to introduce an educational film when the child has mastered it in his real practical life experience.
Always more developed are those children who had and have experience of interesting creative communication with adults in the family, and not those children who received and simply remembered information from the screen!
Why do children love cartoons and advertisements so much?
We know - even babies love to watch ads and cartoons! Why?
- Advertising and videos for toddlers are based on "trance" episodes, edited in clip perception mode. The flickering of plots is fascinating, the child can look at the screen without stopping. But this does not mean that perseverance and attention are developing. The effect will be just the opposite! Children get used to this hyperstimulation and begin to demand it. They can no longer do without her. A child needs everything to move, flicker, and he can no longer just listen to a book, he is not interested in conversations and observations, he insistently demands these hyperstimulations both before bed and during meals, devotes free time to the screen, etc. The kid is bored with drawing, sculpting, playing, designing. He needs new bright hyperstimulation. In the future, it becomes very difficult to come to an agreement with such a baby, and they begin to call him “uncontrollable”. If the TV is constantly working in the house as a background to family life, if the child is accustomed to the fact that the main form of his leisure is watching TV or video, then most often such consequences occur for the baby in the future.
- Pictures of modern cartoons and advertisements are very bright, with special effects. Real life colors are much more natural and therefore less bright. Such rich brightness of colors is very attractive for children. By the way, children use bright colors in their drawings and prefer them in toys and clothes. it is this wave spectrum that they need for development. Bright colors have an intense effect on the eyes of a child, riveting attention to themselves. Having got used to the flickering of bright colors, the child ceases to pay attention to softer shades, they become unattractive to him.
- The researchers noticed that young children are very attracted to flickering, anything from watching a washing machine spinning to flickering a blank TV screen. They prefer this flickering stimulus to observation of a stationary object. That is why the TV screen is so attractive to them. But just the flickering of the screen creates an increased load on the child's body and has an extremely unfavorable effect on the kids.
- Modern children of preschool age often attend many circles and activities in addition to kindergarten. They have no time to play freely. Tired of overload (which is not always immediately visible externally from the behavior of the baby), the child simply cannot actively act from overwork and therefore simply passively consumes what the screen offers him.
The conclusion here is simple - not everything that children like is useful for them! And we, adults, need to take this circumstance into account!
