The paper addresses the issue of how pre-school children are socialized into the world of media in their most natural environment - their families. In particular, it focuses on TV and video as the media still dominating Czech households at the beginning of the new millenium. It concerns family pedagogy and the topics of education in media and media literacy.The attention that has currently been paid to education in media in Czech educational sciences concentrates exclusively on school environment and tends to concern children at the second stage of basic school and grammar schools.The ongoing reform of curricula involves implementation of education in media as one of the so-called cross-sectional topics into outline curricula of basic and grammar school. Children however get to know TV as early as in the first years of their lives and are bringing their basic attitudes and practices regarding TV along to school. Moreover, TV-watching remains a domain associated with their families and their leisure time. Getting to understand processes in the families the children are part of is therefore a necessary prerequisite for successful implementation of education in media in school. The paper sums up some results of a research project focusing on how parents of pre-school children shape and mediate the use of TV and video by children. The core of the paper is a description of the techniques and pedagogic strategies the parents have devised with respect to these media. The research methodology was qualitative; data was collected in semi-structured in-depth interviews with mothers of pre-school children. The research sample consisted of 18 mothers of pre-school children and was stratified by achieved education. The paper describes individual techniques used by parents: limiting access to TV (barriers of all kinds preventing consumption of TV by children), monitoring (checking children's TV consumption at random), coviewing (watching family broadcasts or shows designed specifically for children jointly), direct interaction simultaneous with TV-watching (conversation while watching the TV, purposeful explanation, purposeful fear reduction). Based on to which extent parents use the individual strategies and some other factors, too, three basic pedagogic strategies have been identified: restrictive (parents restrict access to TV strongly, monitoring is not used, the degree of coviewing and direct interaction simultaneous with TV-watching is very high); permissive (parents restrict access to TV only mildly, monitoring is used in a rather formal way, the degree of coviewing and direct interaction simultaneous with TV- watching varies and does not have any pedagogic function), and flexible (the wish to restrict access to TV is declared, but varies, monitoring is used widely, pedagogically justified coviewing and direct interaction simultaneous with TV-watching are regarded as desirable, but are not implemented consistently).The paper also attempts to provide an answer to the question whether education in media in the strict sense of the word takes place in families of pre-school children, i.e. whether parents build up media literacy in their children purposefully.