Talking to kids about gender stereotypes
Images of men and women in the media are often based on stereotypical roles of males and females in our society. Because stereotyping can affect how children feel about themselves and how they relate to others, it's important that they learn to recognize and understand gender stereotypes in different media.
Managing Television and Streaming Video in the Home
Watching TV or streaming video should be a fun and relaxing activity for kids and adults alike—but too often it's a source of family conflict. If you're concerned about television, banning it isn't a practical solution. Instead, you need to learn to co-exist with television by managing how much your kids watch, and what. With more and more ways of viewing TV available we now have access to lots of both good quality and inappropriate TV content. In this crowded television environment, the key is to provide young children with a guided viewing experience and to model and teach them the critical thinking skills they need to be active, engaged viewers.
Family TV Time
Sometimes I wonder if watching TV is going the way of the dodo. Remember when we were kids, and there was concern about how watching TV was going to turn all of us into mindless zombies?
Co-Viewing With Your Kids
One of the most important things you can do to raise media-savvy kids is what’s called shared media engagement. That includes listening to their music, watching TV, movies and videos together, getting to know their favourite apps and playing the games they enjoy. It also includes talking to them about their media lives: what they like, what they’re excited about or looking forward to, and what worries or annoys them. While just being with them is an important step, this is also a great opportunity to help your kids think critically about the media they consume, by asking them questions about it and, sometimes, answering back.Understanding the Rating Systems
Rating systems can be helpful when trying to choose appropriate movies, but with many different systems in use in Canada, they can also be very confusing. To help make sense of the differences, here's an overview of all the systems currently in use.