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iQuestions Faculty, Ted Baehr 
 
 
Question: 
 
I have a 4-year-old who wants to watch everything his 8-year-old 
brother watches, is that a problem? 
 
Answer: 
 
Four-year-olds see the media differently than eight-year-olds. At four 
years old, they’re at the imagination stage of development. They really 
have trouble discerning the difference between fact and fiction. 
 
There’s a book out called Mommy I’m Scared that was taken from 
interviews with students graduating from the University of Wisconsin.  
 
They found that if a student saw a movie like Jaws between three and 
seven years old they thought the shark was real. They got scared by 
it. They would have dreams and nightmares of sharks coming through 
the air conditioning system and in strange places like in the middle of 
the country. The shark became a nightmare in their lives.  
 
Whereas when you turn seven or eight—depending upon the child—
you get into what we call the “concrete” stage of development. That 
means that they now know that it’s just fantasy. They can distinguish 
between imagination and reality and they now say, “That’s just a 
rubber shark. That’s just Bruce.” 
 
Once upon a time my second son—who’s brilliant and in UVA Law 
School now—was playing with a rock, and we had some guests coming 
over so I said, “You’ve got to get rid of that rock.” And Jamie said, 
“That’s my pet frog.”  
 
 
 
I threw the rock out the door. Next thing I know he’s bawling and 
crying, because that was his pet frog. 
 
So the imagination stage of development is very vulnerable to what 
they see. We have a whole set of criteria for determining what they 
should watch and what shouldn’t watch. 
 
They shouldn’t watch fantasies that are confusing to them and can 
lead to scripts of development, which they will later in life mimic and 
they won’t know why. They’ll get in a crisis situation, and instead of 
reacting in a calm and relaxed manner, they’ll start to pick up on 
scripts that they learned about during their three- to seven-year-old 
stage of development. 
 
There’s another problem with the concrete stage, the relationship 
stage: each stage of development reacts differently.  
 
Parents really have a difficult time, especially when both of them are 
working.  
 
In the old days, when everybody was at home on the family farm, they 
knew their children inside-out. Although they couldn’t give the fancy 
names to the stages of development, they were able to discern what 
their children should watch or not watch, what their children should be 
doing, how to develop their children in terms of stories and fantasy. 
 
But today, we’re deeply adrift. The average child watches 63,000 
hours of media by the time they’re seventeen, 11,000 hours of school, 
2,000 hours with their parents, and 800 hours in church—if they go 
every single Sunday for the first seventeen years of their life.  
Baehr -2- 
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