Effects of Television Violence on Children

Effects of Television Violence on Children

Introduction

The effect of media violence on children has been a subject of great interest for social scientists. Watching violence on television has a clear effect on children's behavior. Their actions & language tend to be violent and aggressive after their exposure to television violence, which they later on practice on their friends & families that becomes an uneasy situation for everyone related to that child.

Many studies have been conducted on the subject. However, social scientists, and researchers differ in their justifications for children's development of the language, and are not in agreement on the causes of violence.

Most children today are exposed to television long before they go to school or even start talking, According to the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF), children under six years old watch an average of two hours of television daily whereas six year old children are exposed to a television screen for six hours a day. On the other hand, teenagers could spend up to seven hours a day in front of screens TV and computers.

As children grow their screen time certainly affects their physical activity, spending time with family and doing homework. However, TV could be a good educator but television violence has a serious effect on the language, and behavior of children. They tend to replicate the violence they see in actual lives and hence aid in building an aggressive personality. According, to the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), the children under two years do not watch any TV, and children over the age of two watch not more than one to two hours of quality programming.

Discussion

In media effects research, the exposure to television aggression originates an enhancement in levels of aggression & violence is of great importance. More than 50 years of research has led some researchers to establish that exposure to media violence does causes children to be aggressive in all aspects.

However, other researchers hold that media violence does not cause an increase in aggression or violent behavior. Wide evidence suggests that there is a relation among the exposure to media aggression and violent behavior.

Andrea Martinez, at the University of Ottawa, stated that the lack of consensus on media effects is because of some constraints in the research. This is primarily because television violence is hard to judge & measure. Certain things may be accepted or deemed appropriate in one culture; might not be accepted in the other.

George Gerbner is attributed to conduct the longest study on television violence. He determined television viewers tend to perceive the world in such a way that is consistent with what they see on television. He believed that people tend to perceive the world on the basis of the depictions they see on television. Later another study was conducted by a group of professors based on Gerbner's idea. Their study excluded cartoons due to their comical and unrealistic presentation. Their results concluded that people who watch television regularly tend to overestimate the ...