**8. Evidence of learning (3): self-directed viewing**

In their 2018 survey of media use [46], Ofcom found that 96% of 3–4-yearolds watched TV on a TV set for an average of 14 hours per week, while 30% also watched TV on other devices, mainly on a tablet. 32% watched TV programmes via what are called "over the top" services, such as Netflix, Now TV or Amazon Prime Video. 36% of 3–4-year-olds played games for an average of over 6 hours per week, and 52% went online, for nearly 9 hours a week – much of which would have entailed going to YouTube for animated movies, funny videos or pranks. While most of these figures increased substantially for older age-groups, it was still the case that watching movies on a TV set, although declining slowly but steadily overall, was still a very important activity for three-year-olds. However, as any parent – and indeed any three-year-old – knows, three-year-olds are not the same as two-year-olds! It is extraordinary how little research there is on two-year-olds' movie consumption, given that researchers, at least, have known since 2005 that many babies start watching movies at around 3 months [47].

In the absence of data on the viewing practices of children younger than 3, we have to make inferences about them. It is likely that at home, when parents are too busy to supervise very young children but know that movie-watching will probably occupy them for a while, they will be more likely to leave them to watch a movie on TV than to hand over a phone or tablet, which might get dropped or fought over; and in any case, the younger the children are, the less likely they will be able to deal with menus on VoD services, digital recorders or DVDs, and may thus be more likely to watch broadcast TV, switched on by a parent, carer or older sibling. So it may be reasonable to surmise that the percentage of two-year-olds watching movies on a TV set could even higher than that of 3–4-year-olds. But we also know that many toddlers do watch movies on mobile devices in their buggies when they are in shops, restaurants or other public places, so they may be watching more movies than older children, when we add up the number of opportunities they get to watch movies on any device. It may also mean that they may now have more opportunities to watch on their own, bearing out Ofcom's claim that "consuming content is becoming a more solitary activity, with many children watching on their mobiles" ([46] p. 4).

But what are they watching? A toddler might be ranging over many types of movie, or she might be going through phases of favourite genres, such as funny cat videos on YouTube. In either case, the more significant outcomes for a two-year-old using a portable device to watch movies on her own would be firstly, that she would be developing her own preferences as regards genres, styles and content, rather than having to go along with others' choices; secondly, that her facility with the technology would rapidly improve; and thirdly, that she would be occupied in self-directed learning as she re-viewed those movies that she judged worth watching more than once – perhaps even many times.

Toddlers' interest in re-viewing movies is another phenomenon that worries many parents. A Google search on "my toddler is obsessed with watching …" in August 2021 yielded "about 8,630,000 results" with many social media comments revealing how this magnifies parents' existing anxieties about "screen time" and is usually described in pathologizing terms such as "addiction", while links to parental advice sites offers alarming "evidence" about the negative effects this is likely to have on their later lives. It is interesting that social media concerns about demands for repeat viewing are not paralleled in concerns about repeat reading. For example https://theconversation.com/theres-a-reason-your-child-wants-to-read-the-samebook-over-and-over-again-105733 advises parents who "might wonder if all this repetition is beneficial. The answer is yes. Your child is showing they enjoy this story, but also that they are still learning from the pictures, words, and the interactions you have as you read this book together". If this is true for print media, then why would it not also be true for moving-image media?

In the contrast between the discussions of toddlers' "obsessions" with movies and their demands for re-readings of books, we see the folk wisdom at work again. The idea that toddlers might need to re-view the same movie many times because they need to understand the medium, just as they need to hear stories and look at the pictures over and over again, does not figure in either social media debates or scholarly research, although there have been numerous important studies and reviews of toddlers' cultural learning (e.g. [48–52]). We can excuse Vygotsky's failure to mention children's repeat-viewing of movies, given that he was writing in the 1930s and repeat-viewing was not available to the general public until the VHS format for video-cassette players became widely available in the late 1970s. But the same omission by scholars writing in the 1990s and later only serves to demonstrate the durability of the general belief that no one has to learn how to understand movies. It also demonstrates film scholars' lack of interest in child audiences. Even David Bordwell, one of the major scholars in the field, has no qualms about defining the audiences he is referring to as "schooled perceivers in contemporary Western culture" ([53], p. 34) and no apparent interest in discussing how "perceivers" managed to get "schooled".
