Abstract
Hardly any other medium has influenced and changed family life as much in the last decades as television. In the following, I would like to confine myself to dealing with this section of media society, even if this must seem almost a little old-fashioned in view of the new and entirely new media available to children today. Television is no longer a very young medium, but it still seems to present families with almost insoluble problems. "We need research to give us an idea of how the average family can cope with television. The difficulty of this problem should not be underestimated" said the famous television researcher Paul Lazarsfeld to a US committee in 1955. Today, more than four decades later, a satisfactory answer to the challenges of television for families is still not in sight. Is the task even solvable? Does the example of "television" perhaps even exemplify the dilemma of pedagogy in the times of the media society? I will take a closer look at the difficulty of a pedagogical approach to families with the television on offer from three different angles: from the point of view of family sociology, developmental psychology and communication theory.
