Parental Sources of Educational Cartoons and User Guidelines for Children in Port HarcourtParental Sources of Educational Cartoons and User Guidelines for Children in Port Harcourt

Educational cartoon is an animated cartoon for delivering learning with some humour, used for teaching children alphabets, numeracy, colours, drawing, English language and its vocabularies. It encourages reading among children and aim at developing skills in mathematics, sciences and other disciplines. Educational cartoon helps children relax and encourage flexible thinking and must be carefully selected, monitored and supervised by parents for the educational objectives to be achieved. The study investigated parental sources of educational cartoons and the guidelines parents set for children. The area of the study was Port Harcourt city. Descriptive survey design was adopted. The population consisted of 1,123,998 literate parents. The sample for the study was 300 parents. Questionnaire was used for data collection. Data were analyzed using mean and standard deviation. Findings indicated that parents sourced educational cartoons from six out of ten listed sources such as: subscription to satellite cable stations, purchasing of cartoon in CD or DVD forms, local/terrestrial television stations, book shops, stationary vendors and computer games. Eight guidelines adopted in using educational cartoons were also identified. The study concludes that the sources of educational cartoon in the area are limited; also the guidelines parents apply in children’s use of educational cartoons were limited. The study therefore, recommends that Government and institutions should see to the provision of different sources of educational cartoons.