100 Family Media Literacy Activities, Ages Pre-School through Teen Years

Are You a “High Hopes” Parent?

Attending to Our Children’s Attention Span

Building the Foundation for Resiliency Skills

Live and Play in Your World: Stimulus Addiction and the Growing Brain

Looking for Meaning in All the Right Places

Parenting Today: The World Has Changed, Have We?

Parenting as a Living System

Reading the Screen

Screen Time and Obesity

Screen Violence: Impact on Self as Relational Being

Teaching Children Gratefulness

100 Family Media Literacy Activities (cont.)

11.       Consider screen and school stereotypes.
Discuss with your teen the different groups of students at the school he/she attends. Some questions to consider could be: “Are there jocks, nerds? goths? etc? How does media contribute to the creation of these groupings? Do most teens feel compelled to belong to a certain group? Why or why not?”

12.       Stereotypes and bulling.
In the discussion of screen-generated school stereotypes, you may want to ask: “What happened to kids who don’t fit into any of the identified categories? Do kids who are different get bullied more often? Why or why not? Would eliminating the categories of types of students stop the bullying? Why or why not?”

13.       Gender representation.
Ask your teen to consider how males and females are represented in his/her favorite programming, movies, and video games. Consider such questions as: “Are these representations accurate? Fair? What do you learn about males and females from these representations? How would you change these images if you could? Why?

14.       Does branding create a collective universal stereotype?
Explore this question with your teen. One example is the Pepsi brand that always is associated with young, happy “with-it” people drinking Pepsi. When these types of images are repeated so often to masses of people, do the people viewing them come to believe that is who they are? As your teen answers this question and others you discuss, be sure to ask your teen, “How do you know?” This will encourage him/her to think specifically about the reasons for any answer given.

15.       Compare the old with the new.
Rent older comedies such as I Love Lucy or older westerns or any older film. Compare gender, racial, and ethic representations with current ones. Amplify to your teen how media reflects current trends in our society and provides political and social messages as well as entertains it viewers.

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