What Does Television Teach Children? Examining the Altruistic and Egoistic Lessons in Children’s Educational Television

To distinguish and systematically categorize message content emphasized by children’s educational media, we applied a coding scheme based on the model of intuitive motivation and exemplars to a sample of educational television series recommended by CommonSenseMedia.org. Results revealed a preponderance of the egoistic motivation of competence (overall and in TV series emphasizing scholastic learning) and the altruistic motivation of care (in series emphasizing social skills). By applying a scheme of comprehensive human motivations to identify the values emphasized in different types of children’s educational television, this study may help scholars more meaningfully identify, predict, and explain outcomes resulting from exposure to media content.