Supernatural Creatures,Accidents,and War

Abstract

This study explored preschool children’s television-related fears through a general study of children’s television-viewing habits. Based on semi-structured interviews with eighteen Estonian preschoolers, the results showed that young children’s fears were represented not only in adult programs but also in seemingly child-friendly cartoons through which children tended to see the fictional story as real. However, children were not passive victims: they took an active role in diminishing their television-related fears by using various coping strategies, including peer mediation. These results support the notion that children are second-level mediators who share with their peers both their own experiences and what their parents have taught them about television.

Keywords

childhood fears coping mediation preschool children television

Children from very different nationalities, cultures, and socioeconomic backgrounds experience similar fears at the same ages. Fears are a normal part of child’s development. From the evolutionary perspective, humans are “preprogrammed” to develop different fears at certain ages to survive. When a fear is no longer useful, it usually recedes in the process of the cognitive and emotional development (Burnham 2005; Last 2006).

Fears are not only instincts but also results of numerous environmental factors, including media. Children grow up in media- and technology-rich environments. Although the popularity of new media is growing, television has remained the dominant medium for preschoolers even in countries with high computer usage (Gutnick et al. 2011; Lemish 2015). For instance, in the United States, children aged two to eleven spend twenty-two hours and sixteen minutes per week watching television (Nielsen 2014). In the United Kingdom, children aged five to fifteen spend an average of two hours and fourteen minutes per day with television (Ofcom 2014).

Many studies in social psychology (e.g., Burnham 2005; S. Smith and Moyer-Gusé 2006) confirm links between media and children’s emotions, including fears. Yet few of these studies have focused on preschoolers, and fear studies in social psychology are also usually directed at the fears themselves, rather than on children’s television-viewing habits in general. A more qualitative and general reception study as this one among a group of eighteen Estonian preschoolers allowed unexpected aspects of television viewing to emerge spontaneously, including children’s television-related fears, their coping strategies, and peer mediation.

According to studies on social mediation of children’s media use, parents and educators have an important role in reducing the risk of children experiencing traumatic reactions to media (Cantor and Riddle 2014; Dürager and Livingstone 2012). Estonia provides an interesting research context in which very media-active children are managing their use experiences with comparatively little adult guidance. Among nine- to sixteen-year-olds, 82 percent use the Internet daily; furthermore, Estonian children lead European rankings by the share of those who have faced online risks (according to the EU Kids Online survey in twenty-five countries; see Livingstone et al. 2011). Little statistical information has been collected about Estonian preschool children’s television watching. According to parents’ estimations, 96 percent of Estonian children aged five to seven watched television regularly, and 23 percent of them spent more than ten hours a week (YouGov Zapera 2010). Neither parents nor teachers of preschoolers, however, engage very actively with children in talks about media or children’s media use (Vinter and Siibak 2012). Moreover, Estonian parents stand out in Europe for their comparatively untroubled attitudes toward online risks their children may encounter (Kalmus 2013).

Childhood Fears and Coping Strategies

In everyday use, the terms fear and anxiety are often confused as synonymous; however, they are distinct phenomena. Fear is a concrete reaction to a subject, whereas anxiety is a generalized uncomfortable feeling (Bhatia 2009). Fears are instincts that help humans to survive (Burnham 2005). With children, fears are the result of interactions with the environment (Sameroff 1975). The causes of fears can be internal or external, or both (D. Smith et al. 1990). The content of children’s fears change as they move from infancy into their preschool years. At the age of two and younger, the most common fears are the fear of separation, strangers, novel stimuli, and high places. Between the age of two and three, children become afraid of the dark (Last 2006). The number of fears seems to peak between two-and-a-half and four years. As children age, their fears become more realistic. They become less fearful of imaginary creatures, and more fearful of bodily harm and injury (Ollendick and Schroeder 2006).

Media and Children’s Fears

The fantasies and fears of young children often involve stories that they have seen in media. In a study by Muris et al. (2001), 78 percent of children (N = 129) reported that the main cause of their fears was negative information (largely received from television). Other studies have shown that most preschool children have been frightened by media content, in which they can recall the specific scenes that upset them (Cantor et al. 2010; Korhonen and Lahikainen 2008; Riddle et al. 2012; Walma van der Molen et al. 2002).

Valkenburg et al. (2000) name four types of media-related fears: (1) interpersonal violence, (2) war and suffering, (3) fires and accidents, and (4) fantasy characters. The fear of supernatural and fantasy characters is most common among young children, followed by the fear of someone being hurt or killed and then by the fear of animals (Cantor et al. 2010). Lemish (2007) and Cantor (2001) explain that the younger the children, the more they are afraid of televised things that seem dangerous (such as a scary face), adding that when children age, they start to see threats in more abstract things (such as illness). Young children’s thinking is more perceptually dominated, and thus, they are likely to react to and be afraid of striking visual cues in a television program (S. Smith and Wilson 2002). In earlier studies, Sparks and Cantor (1986) found that some popular TV series (e.g., The Incredible Hulk, CBS, 1978–1982) are extremely frightening to young children. Many adults cannot understand why as the character stands for the good, but the authors concluded that young children do not understand the ambivalence of the character and transformation from a person to a superhuman. Very young children are more likely than older children to fear things that are not real (Cantor and Riddle 2014).

Some scholars (e.g., Knox 2004; Last 2006; Patzlaff 2009) have been especially worried about young children watching news, claiming that it constructs a world that is biased toward accidents, violence, and drama, as the endless news cycle tends to tell dramatic stories instead of affirming stability of the world (see Monahan 2010). In a Dutch study, interpersonal violence, fires, accidents, disasters, and visual depictions of the consequences of violence in news frightened children most (Walma van der Molen et al. 2002). In a U.S. study, children most frequently mentioned natural disasters, kidnappings, and burglaries as frightening (Riddle et al. 2012). S. Smith and Wilson (2002) also found that young children do not understand the genre and function of the news as adequately as older children do.

A number of studies have focused on developmental differences in news reception. This line of research has established that exposure to and fear reactions from news usually increase with age (Riddle et al. 2012). Furthermore, young children’s emotional responses to media presentations differ from the responses of cognitively more mature individuals and may surprise adults (Sparks and Cantor 1986). Young children, who are not adept at distinguishing fantasy from reality, may be less frightened by the news than by the things that cannot possibly happen because news are usually not as visually spectacular as fantasy stories (Cantor and Riddle 2014). In terms of specific content, younger children aged five to eight were more scared of concrete visual dangers (such as weapons and bombs) depicted in the news, whereas older children aged thirteen to seventeen were afraid of more abstract threats (S. Smith and Moyer-Gusé 2006).

Studying children’s television-related fears in retrospect has shown that frightening content becomes part of young adults’ memories. In a study by Riddle (2012), half of 164 young adults could remember a specific news event that frightened them during childhood. Another study by Cantor et al. (2010) found that lingering anxieties and sleep disturbances related to frightening television memories were common among grade-school children, and almost 40 percent of 219 children said that some things from scary shows still bothered them. As most of the children who had been scared had not chosen to view the program that frightened them, authors claimed that whether children are attracted to scary media or not, they are vulnerable to these effects. Therefore, they suggested that further research was needed on prevention and coping strategies.

Coping Strategies

Children grow to master their fears, including television-induced fears, by using different coping strategies. These can be divided into cognitive and noncognitive strategies (Calvert and Wilson 2011). Through cognitive strategies, children try to reason their fears away by convincing themselves that frightening content is not real (e.g., blood on television is ketchup). A noncognitive strategy is one of physical avoidance, such as closing one’s eyes or switching off the television. Studies by Walma van der Molen et al. (2006) and Valkenburg et al. (2000) have shown that young children tend to use more cognitive strategies than noncognitive strategies. Theories of social mediation of children’s media use emphasize how the multidimensional interactions between children and socializing agents, such as parents, siblings, other relatives, teachers, or peers, determine which coping strategies children use, and what is the outcome in terms of the child’s emotions and developing media literacy and resilience (Kirwil 2009; Vandoninck et al. 2012). It has been found that fear and anxiety levels were higher in children who watched television alone compared with children who watched television with their siblings/friends or parents (Gülay 2011). Most of the research on the social mediation of children’s media use has, more or less explicitly, proceeded from the protectionist paradigm that sees children as innocent and vulnerable, in need of guidance, protection, and even control by adults (Kalmus 2012). Accordingly, parental intervention is often seen as the means for protecting children from potential media harm. However, studies (e.g., De Cock 2012; Paavonen et al. 2009) have also shown that active parental intervention is not a simple and magical solution to the fears provoked by television content. De Cock (2012) demonstrated that well-intended explanations may broaden the child’s comprehension of a news event, but they do not necessarily help mitigate fear, or they may even magnify scary details. Only a few studies (e.g., Gülay 2011; Kalmus et al. 2012; Nathanson 2001) have looked at the role of peers in shaping media effects on children and adolescents, and this kind of mediation was also salient in the study presented here.

Few academic studies in Estonia have investigated children’s media-related fears and coping with them. One survey (Taimalu 2007) looked at preschoolers’ fears in general by comparing data from 1993 (115 children and their parents) and 2002 (ninety-one children and ninety parents). The analysis demonstrated that imagination-related fears, including television-induced fears, imagined creatures, and nightmares, dramatically increased during that time period. The study also reported some increase in the use of different coping strategies such as escaping behavior (e.g., running away, closing eyes), active constructive behavior to change the situation (e.g., switching on lights), or attachment behavior and seeking support from close people. Lahikainen et al. (2003) compared Estonian and Finnish children’s fears, and concluded that young children were more capable than they had assumed in expressing a wider range of fears, including those induced by television programs.

Method: Data Collection and Analysis

The first author of this article conducted semi-structured interviews with eighteen children aged four to seven in two kindergartens in Estonia. Subjects were first contacted via a letter to two mixed-age kindergarten classes to interview children at different ages to reveal some potential differences between younger and older kindergarten children. From this contact, the participants in the research were all of those expressing interest in the study. Written consent was obtained from the kindergarten administrators and parents after which children volunteered to talk with the researcher. Children were interviewed in their classrooms.

In all, eight four-year-old, four five-year-old, four six-year-old, and two seven-year-old children were interviewed. There were eleven boys and seven girls. The interviews lasted fifteen to forty-five minutes. As the interviews with younger children were two to three times shorter and not as information rich as those conducted with older children, more young children were interviewed to achieve data saturation among the youngest interviewees. One-on-one semi-structured interviews were preferred as young children can easily become distracted and start to copy their friends’ responses. Children were asked about their television-viewing habits and situations in general: what shows they watch, what they like, what they dislike, who their favorite television characters are, with whom they watch television, what kind of restrictions they have on television viewing, and how much guidance they receive from adults. The interviews were combined with a projective technique, which supports children’s recollections of the television programs they might have recently seen, which provide picture-based input for conversation. The children looked at five photo collages representing forty-four programs aired on Estonian channels during the month prior to this study and named the programs they had seen. The researcher asked additional questions based on the children’s answers.

In the analysis, children were considered in two age groups, four- to five-year-olds and six- to seven-year-olds, to account for the fast developmental changes in children at early ages.

Interviews were audio recorded and transcribed verbatim. Qualitative content analysis, including both theory-driven and inductive approaches, was used to analyze the transcriptions. The main categories that emerged from the data related to children’s television-viewing habits, including time spent watching television, viewing preferences, context and setting, guidance by significant others, coviewing, and children’s own perceptions of television’s effects. A further selective coding was conducted to focus in detail on children’s television-related fears. This analysis included such categories as types of programs children felt disturbed by, when and with whom they watched the programs that upset them, how they reacted to disturbing content, and which practices they used to manage their television-related fears.

One of the strengths of this study—using very young children as first informants—is also a limitation. The study relied on what children said; young children, however, have rich imagination. To understand when a child is fantasizing, the researcher has to use different techniques (e.g., asking specific follow-up questions). Typical to qualitative studies, the results are not generalizable. However, despite the small sample size, the study provides insights for further studies about very young children’s television-related fears, peer mediation, and young children as active agents in coping with their television-related fears.

Results

Frightening Television Content According to Children’s Perception

Most of the characters that especially younger children considered scary were imaginary, such as characters with supernatural powers, witches, monsters, ghosts, and dragons. Children were most commonly disturbed by some details of a character, for example, long teeth or big noses, or by the abilities of those characters. For instance, the fictional character Urr from the TV series Moomin (Telecable Benelux B.V., 1990–1991) was scary to young children because the character could freeze anything it saw. In another cartoon (title unknown), supernatural bananas scared a child because they were enormous and chased the “good” characters. Those fears may seem insignificant compared with those featured in genres for grown-ups, but the young respondents described cartoon scenes as though they were from action or horror movies: “Suddenly a scary girl came. She had ugly face and scary voice. . . . I was about to cry, but I didn’t” (boy, age four).

The fears of younger and older children were somewhat different. Those in the younger age group were most often afraid of children’s programs or things that they had accidentally seen or coviewed while their parents were watching television. It is notable that interviewees considered all different kinds of content and genres almost equally realistic and potentially frightening, even if they said they knew that not all the content was real. Therefore, some younger children were more fearful of the content they had seen on a cartoon than in other more real-looking programs that adults would consider as frightening to children. Older children had fears triggered by cartoons and children’s programs too, but additionally, they gave rich descriptions of being scared while watching adult programs, such as action movies and crime dramas. These fears were more related to actions and events (such as scenes of houses burning, somebody being chased, war, shootings, or other injuries) than concrete characters.

The children’s understanding of reality and fiction was constantly developing, as shown by the differences between the interviewees. One reason for these differences between older and younger children may be that the older children had more opportunities to see programs targeted at adults, as they went to sleep slightly later and, according to interviews, had fewer restrictions on their television viewing than very young children. Due to developmental differences, older children were more focused in watching television. The younger and older children also differed in terms of the amount of details in their descriptions. The older children were more emotional and intense when they talked about wounds, blood, gunshots, and weapons:

A guy had hooks in his arms, back, belly, mouth and everywhere. He tried to pull out those hooks, but he couldn’t . . . and then there was a woman and a key inside something . . . The woman had to pick up this key, but her hand caught fire. . . . She was bleeding all over and she fell. (Girl, age six)

The younger children just mentioned the scary content or character, without going into as much detail. These differences also may have been due to the television-viewing opportunities and content available to children, as well as their developmental levels of self-expression and understanding.

Some children brought up the same examples repeatedly during the conversation, regardless of the interview question. Based on what children repeated, they were most disturbed by scenes from action movies involving violence. Both the younger and older children seemed especially daunted by escape scenes, whether or not the villain caught the “good” characters. The threat of a character not being able to escape was frightening to the children. The motif of escape was connected with both the children’s imagination and everyday life. For example, a five-year-old boy described how he would escape from a scary cartoon character if it came into his home:

I would run away to Tallinn then. If Urr comes to Tallinn, I would escape to Finland. If Urr is in Finland, I would escape to England and if there is one in England, I would travel to a warm country. Then Urr will melt in the sunshine and die. (Boy, age five)

Children Watching the News

The children did not particularly like news, although they still watched news programs in coviewing situations with adults. This viewing was often accidental. The news in Estonia was broadcast during prime time, when children and adults often shared the main area of the home. Interviews showed that the parents typically watched the news with children playing in the same room; the children focused on their play but were also open to watching the news if a topic caught their attention.

The children remembered a great variety of the content they had seen on the news: car accidents, drownings, burning houses, ill people, and injured animals, as well as weather forecasts, sports news, and cute animal babies. Even when children mentioned serious content, such as accidents or injuries, they did not consider the news necessarily scary. Instead, they expressed confusion:

There are cars and sometimes cars drown . . . and then there are people and skulls and . . . some accidents have happened to the people. (Girl, age four)

There was an animal which had some frozen illness. I didn’t understand what was done to the animal and we started to watch another channel. (Girl, age six)

Several children considered the news boring because there were only “grown-ups” talking. The quotes indicate the nature of these children’s television viewing. They preferred visually striking content that kept their attention. If a television program was talk-driven and not meant for them, they lost interest quickly. This is likely one of the reasons why the children preferred Reporter (Channel 2, 2004–present), which is a more entertaining news program on a commercial channel, than the news on the public broadcasting channel. The first program offers “soft” topics such as animal videos or interviews with famous artists, whereas news on public broadcasting channel are mainly serious stories on economy, politics, and social issues, which in children’s understanding are “boring adults’ talks.”

The children described news content (injuries, accidents, etc.) that had the potential to disturb them as much as action movies, but did not actually bother them. Some possible explanations can be found from the genre differences and children’s developing understanding of genres. Fiction content looks mostly as real as news content, but is visually more stimulating due to peculiarities of television genres. Especially on public broadcasting news, the real horror of things was not shown close up, and was instead expressed via description and distant pictures, whereas in fictional programs, accidents are often shown close up. If children tend to consider all content that “looks real” as real events, it is more understandable why they talked more emotionally about fictional (though very realistic) programs.

Fright versus Excitement

The younger children described scenes from children’s programs, which both excited and frightened them. If asked why they watched the program despite being scared by several characters, the children explained that they did not want to miss the parts of the shows they liked:

Interviewer: Why do you still watch the show if you are afraid of Kivivalvur Ropka [a witch from children’s television play Witch Stone (ETV, 1979)]?

Child: I don’t know. I want to see it because maybe something funny . . . or some other of my favorite things will happen. (Girl, age four)

The older children admitted, too, that they were afraid of shootings and violence they had seen on crime dramas but, at the same time, were excited by the content in general. In other words, the children liked frightening content to an extent. A balance between strong and moderate fearfulness was entertaining, and was one of the rewards of television viewing. This also showed how children played with their limits and tested how far they could go until their excitement was replaced by fright. Moderate fear can be even useful, as, according to developmental theories, children learn by experimenting, testing limits, and experiencing the consequences of their behavior. In the examples of this study, the children had learned that some programs bring unwanted outcomes and made them cautious: “I have the Imp on DVD, but I don’t watch it, because I am afraid of it” (girl, age four).

Television Fears and Children’s Everyday Lives

Interviews with children revealed that children’s television-related fears appeared in their everyday lives, too. One of the most common consequences was interrupted sleep. Children described experiencing bad dreams that involved escaping from potentially threatening characters (e.g., aggressive animals, villains, supernatural creatures) they had seen on television. Some of them mentioned waking up in the middle of the night: “A police car was chasing me and I woke up. I finally fell asleep again, but it was very hard to fall asleep” (boy, age seven).

Several children could relate television shows or movies directly to their dreams and therefore expressed wariness about watching content that might result in bad dreams:

Interviewer: So you think that war movies are not good for children?

Child: Yes, because you will see bad dreams. If you watch war movies, you will see war in your dreams. (Boy, age seven)

Parents may have contributed to children’s television-related fears by using threatening television characters to discipline them. For example, a child said his mother threatened to call Urr to freeze his toys if he did not pick them up. The child (age five) was confused whether the scary character could come “out of the television.” This practice had traditional roots. In Estonia, parents have used fictional characters from folk tales as a means to teach and to discipline children. If a child listened to the story, it was up to their imagination to picture the character (traditional folk tales are told verbally), or even if the child could see the picture in the book, it was still not a moving image, and much was left for imagination.

Children Coping with Television-related Fears

The study results indicate that the children were active viewers who used different coping strategies to counterbalance their television-induced fears. One of the most common strategies of both the younger and older children was to close their eyes during scary scenes. This was a noncognitive strategy to try to avoid contact with frightening content. Even if they were watching their favorite shows repeatedly, children described how they closed their eyes in anticipation if they knew that a certain scene might scare them.

Another strategy that children described was to walk away from the television set and do something else instead. Leaving may also have reflected boredom. In some cases, it was hard to differentiate between boredom, fright, and other reasons, but in other examples, children linked their leaving directly to the attempt to avoid disturbing content, which can be seen as a preventive coping strategy:

Child: I have seen Reporter, but I don’t watch it. It shows those bad things. . . . Those bad house burnings.

Researcher: What do you do then?

Child: I go play. (Girl, age five)

The children described taking an active role in avoiding fears. This did not mean that they left the television set every time they became frightened, but it indicated that they were open to leaving the television on their own initiative. Similarly, they knew from previous experience to avoid some programs if they did not want to experience fear.

By communicating with a fear mentally, the children could control their emotions to an extent, and this influenced their television viewing. Some younger children described how they dealt with their fears by telling themselves that the frightening characters could not harm them. This cognitive strategy was mainly preventive, as they tried to reason how the content was not frightening: “You can tell a fear to go away. Sometimes I try to tell ghosts that I am not afraid of them. Then the ghosts think that I am stronger than they are” (boy, age four).

The older children reacted to their fears cognitively, too, but their reflections did not involve as much fantasy as in the younger children’s descriptions. Older children tended to self-soothe by reminding themselves that they were “big kids,” and therefore could not be afraid of television content as much as they thought young children would be. This is a typical example of third-person effect (believing that others are more influenced by media): “There was a monster too, but actually I am not afraid as I am already a big girl. Since turning five years old, I am not afraid of it” (girl, age six).

It is debatable whether this strategy helped to overcome their fears or only suppressed them. For example, if a child stated watching a show that was both frightening and fun, the child could calm down during frightening scenes by thinking that it was not scary and therefore could continue watching until the fun scenes.

This coping strategy probably helped children entertain themselves by balancing between being seriously afraid and by being excited of some fright. Already preschool children can understand that everything that they see on television is not real: “It is all a game and they only played like this woman was killed” (girl, age six). However, if asked about particular programs, some younger children got confused. For example, they said that cartoons were fiction; however, they doubted whether they could meet cartoon characters in real life, too. This may have reflected the fact that adults had explained that not all the television content was real, but in practice, children still struggled to tell the difference on their own, especially if the program “looked realistic” (e.g., real people in familiar places investigating crimes in an Estonian detective serial Office of Revenge [Channel 3, 2009–present] that children often mentioned). Nevertheless, reminding oneself that a program was a play worked as a generally helpful strategy for children in coping with television fears.

Children as Mediators

As stated in the literature review above, studies of the social mediation of children’s media use tend to see adults as mediators and the ones who can support the development of children’s media skills. The results of this study show that although parents acted as mediators in gatekeeping and explaining television content, the children themselves were mediators, too. Children shared with friends what their parents had taught them about television and their own media experiences. The latter, being personal and narrated by peers, seemed to be more reliable. For example, a child who had had bad dreams related to a certain television program warned a friend not to watch the same program:

I was at Krissu’s birthday and there was a scary movie on television. I started to watch it, but Krissu told me not to because I might dream about it later. Krissu had watched this movie before and had had bad dreams. (Girl, age six)

This example demonstrates both a child’s proactiveness in sharing her media experience and the other child’s receptiveness to this information. The child described her friend’s sayings as something from an authority, and, at least according to the child’s statement, she did not continue watching the movie. Other examples of children “teaching” television to each other were more related to general threats of television viewing (e.g., harm to eyes) than directly to fears, but these also reflected the children’s self-consciousness and willingness to share the knowledge they had learned. For example, a five-year-old boy explained, “You might harm your eyes by watching too much TV. Then you have to wear glasses. But the more you eat carrot, the healthier your eyes are.” This, obviously, is related to the question of the adequacy of the information provided by children.

Conclusions and Discussion

Although children’s television-related fears are well described by many authors (e.g., Anderson et al. 2001; Cantor et al. 2010; Cantor and Riddle 2014; Riddle et al. 2012; S. Smith and Wilson 2002; Sparks and Cantor 1986; Valkenburg et al. 2000; Walma van der Molen et al. 2002), a large part of previous studies have been conducted either within social psychology or the protectionist paradigm in media studies. According to a predominant assumption underlying the latter research tradition, children are granted little or no independent agency: they are implicitly treated as relatively passive victims of media effects and as recipients of adults’ help or control (cf. Buckingham 2000). Our study proceeded from the constructionist epistemology and the principle of child-centeredness by viewing kids as resourceful actors vis-à-vis media and other social agents. Accordingly, our methodology allowed young children to speak about television-viewing habits based on their own perspective (cf. Buckingham 1993). When starting this qualitative research, we did not assume that television-related fears and coping with them would spontaneously emerge as prominent themes in young children’s talk. Yet the study revealed, quite unexpectedly, that children’s television viewing, frightening experiences, and coping strategies were inextricably linked in preschoolers’ narratives. This, alongside with the consideration that the media as well as the contexts of reception and social mediation are constantly changing, suggests that the need for studying and understanding media-related fears is still acute.

In particular, our study revealed that a prominent feature in preschoolers’ talk was a fear of good characters being caught and children’s empathy with those being chased. Several children had faced scenarios of struggling to escape in their dreams, which, in some cases, resulted in waking up crying. This finding suggests that at least one of the negative outcomes of television viewing—interrupted sleep—which has been brought up in many studies within the media effects research tradition (e.g., Feiss and Hoges 2000; Taimalu 2007), is also relevant in children’s own perspective. Another noticeable outcome, especially in younger children’s imaginations, was the fear that the things they had seen on television might happen in reality (e.g., a scary character “getting out of television” and chasing them).

The results of our study are in line with previous findings that children’s fears are age specific (e.g., Cantor and Riddle 2014). Even our small sample revealed that the fears of younger (four- to five-year-old) and older (six- to seven-year-old) children were qualitatively different. Younger children’s fears involved more fictional characters (ghosts, witches, or supernatural characters), whereas older children’s fears were more realistic and rather related to alarming actions (e.g., crime scenes, chasing, fights, or fire) than concrete characters. In consistence with findings from previous studies (Cantor 2001; Lemish 2007; Ollendick and Schroeder 2006; Sparks and Cantor 1986), our results confirmed that young children perceive various types of frightening content equally realistically and they can be afraid of things that cannot happen in real life.

When it comes to television genres, our findings provide somewhat surprising insights. Although in several earlier studies (e.g., De Cock 2012; Riddle et al. 2012; Valkenburg et al. 2000) children admitted being afraid of various news content and many other studies have concluded that excessive media coverage of different accidents can contribute to the development of similar fears in a child (Last 2006; S. Smith and Moyer-Gusé 2006), children in our study described very dramatic scenes they had seen on the news without expressing anxiety or fear related to the news content.

Especially, the younger children described accidents, death, or injured people seen on the news without any great concerns. In contrast to their calm reactions to the news, young kids considered some children’s genres (e.g., supposedly child-friendly cartoons) surprisingly scary. A cognitive explanation offered by developmental psychology is that preschool children are too young to understand the real horror of things seen on the news because they do not understand abstract fears yet, as, for instance, Cantor (2001), Lemish (2007), and S. Smith and Wilson (2002) have suggested, and therefore, fictional characters in realistic situations may seem more frightening than real-life events on the news. The constructionist and child-centered perspective can provide a complementary explanation: television-related fears are to be interpreted as part and subjective outcomes of the child’s “lifeworld,” that is, lived experiences and meaning making as described by Schutz and Luckmann (1973). Accordingly, imaginary things young kids see on children’s programs they watch every day may seem more present and close to their personal social space, and thus more real and frightening than distant dramatic events seen occasionally on the news.

Our small-scale study revealed an astonishingly great variety of children’s coping strategies. Our young interviewees used cognitive strategies as described by Calvert and Wilson (2011), such as talking to a fear in their minds, reminding to themselves that frightening content was not real, or that they were already “big kids” (the third-person effect). Children also practiced noncognitive strategies, which are preventative and involve avoidance (e.g., closing the eyes, leaving the room, or avoiding watching certain programs). These findings provide a picture of young children as active processors of meaning with a rich repertoire of strategies to cope with their fears, as several other authors have suggested (e.g., Anderson et al. 2001; Buckingham 2007). Furthermore, our study demonstrated how children act as social mediators by sharing their personal media experiences with peers or describing their friend’s statements about media content as something coming from an authority. Children also played the role of “second-level mediators” in sharing with peers what their parents had taught them about television. These findings, in line with previous peer mediation studies (Gülay 2011; Nathanson 2001), suggest that peer support has much potential in helping children (even very young kids as our interviews demonstrated) to cope with television-related fears. Although peer mediation is often used in emotion management, conflict resolution, and teaching new skills to school children (Cremin 2007), peer-to-peer teaching should deserve more attention also in media education, including preschool level. Definitely, more research is needed to provide more practical guidelines how to encourage peer mediation among the youngest audience.

The results of our study also have implications for parental mediation. If adults proceed only from their own perspective, they might underestimate the content and genres that actually disturb (or entertain) children, as Sparks and Cantor (1986) found already in their early studies. Our study, thus, calls for the child-centered approach to be applied also in parental mediation. This means that extensive discussions with children on media-related topics are to be encouraged to understand children’s own interpretations of television content, and to provide explanations and emotional support when needed. Furthermore, several unintended and undesired outcomes of restrictive parental mediation, revealed in our previous analysis of interviews with children (Kruuse and Kalmus 2014), suggest that more attention should be paid to raising parents’ awareness of the specificity of TV medium and potential outcomes of different strategies of social mediation.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The preparation of this article was supported by the grants from the Estonian Research Council (ETF 8527) and the Estonian Ministry of Education and Research (IUT 20-38).

Author Biographies

Kristiina Kruuse is a PhD student of media and communication at University of Tartu, Estonia, researching young children’s media consumption and media effects on children. She has lead the project “Inter-generational Relations and Value Orientations of Families,” financed by Estonian Doctoral School of Behavioural, Social and Health Sciences (European Social Fund [ESF]), and participated in the project “Generations and Inter-generational Relations in the Emerging Information Society,” financed by Estonian Research Council. She also works as a senior research consultant in private sector.

Veronika Kalmus is a professor of sociology at the Institute of Social Studies, University of Tartu, Estonia. Her research focuses on socialization, intergenerational relationships, social mediation of children’s media use, social and personal time, patterns of media use, and cultural values. She has published extensively in international journals and collections, including Childhood, Children & Society, Discourse & Society, Journal of Children and Media, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, and Young.

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