ABSTRACT
Children develop their identities from many factors including mass media, but parents play a significant role in their children’s relationship to mass media by their behavior as well as their words. The role of parents in the relationship of children to the media has run the gamut from all media, all day to no media, any day. A literary version of the all media, all day extreme can be seen in Dahl’s (1988) Matilda, the story of a child prodigy whose parents prefer television to books. In the following excerpt, 5-year-old Matilda tries to get away from the TV:
In the film version, Matilda uses her powers of concentration to blow up the television in protest of her parents’ behavior. The literary presentation is the opposite of what we might expect of the roles of parents and children regarding media.
