Abstract:

Children under 5 years of age spend almost 4 hours per day interacting with mobile devices, and this time increases to over 7 hours per day between the ages of 5 and 10. (Ralph. and Petrina 2019 p.1) The time spent using digital devises has tripled from an average of 5 minutes per day in 2011 to 15 minutes a day in 2013 (Brito, 2019). Preschool games are easily found on the web like education.com. During early childhood children learn the best via actions - manipulations of real objects, exploration and interactions with other children and adults. However multimedia companies create games for very young children and even for toddlers. The American Academy of Pediatrics (2018) suggests that for children age 2-5 years old to use interactive, non-violent, educational and prosocial media. They also suggest to parents to actively play with children and to find activities that are healthy. Prosocial skills such as friendship is a close dyadic relationship between two individuals (Lindsey, 2002). The effect of friendship has both a positive and negative influence on child development (Laad et al., 1996) since the dynamic features of friendships create various psychological benefits and costs. Studies done by Yu et al. (2011) demonstrated that friendship and play opportunities for children with developmental delays were similar in many ways to those of children considered typically developing. During early childhood, the main ingredients in forming friendships are opportunity and similarity (Cook & Cook, 2009), initiative and complementary interactions (Goldman & Buysee, 2007). The focus on this research project is to investigate if three and 4-year-old children associate friends with fictional characters from movies, video-games, toys rather than real people? Are fictional characters important figures in the children is live? This study used a qualitative, ethnographic research method based on interviewing 73 children 3- and 4-years olds attending the Child Development and Learning Center located in Midwest of the United State. The procedure for collecting data was based on asking children to draw friends and answers questions about who these friends were and why. The results of the study demonstrated that almost all children pointed to real people such as peers and family as friends, but none of them named characters from video games or movies as their friends or friends in general. Children did not identify fictional character as illustrations of or a model of friendship.

Keywords:

Multi-media, young children, friendship.