Influence of TV programming

Influence of TV programming

Introduction

As we enter a new millennium, watching television becomes the major activity for children. The majority of pre-school children used to watch television every day and they may spend approximately from two to four or even more hours in front of a TV set. While television may not only inform and entertain children, it may also influence on their psychological development and socialization. There is a large amount of the effects of television; a few among them are effects of TV violence, effects of pornography and erotica, effects of advertising. All these affects have a great impact on children's cognition and behavior as well as on their educational achievement.(Davies,2010) Nowadays it is not a surprise to see violence scenes on television. In fact, over two past decade's violence represented on TV has highly increased. Children may watch programs with violence context at the morning time or early afternoon so there is a little probability that it will not influence on them ( Winn,2002). Firstly, Anderson (2003) argued that watching TV programs and films contained violence context may cause on aggressive behavior and increased aggressive attitudes. They defined four types of violence effects: “the aggressor effect”, “the victim effect”, “the bystander effect” and “the appetite effect”. Under the aggressor effect children are likely to be more violent, mean and aggressive. For example, they may think that aggression is the appropriate way to solve a conflict situation they may use their power to resolve the situation. Victim effect describes how children become more fearful watching violence scenes on TV. Thereby a child may consider a world dangerous which cause in misunderstanding and fearing other people. Bystander effect may lead a child's indifference to real-life events which normally arouse some negative or positive emotions. And finally the appetite effect shows that children watching TV violence are likely to desire it more thereby they confirm their behavior (Winn,2002). Of course there is some individual differences in the way TV violence influence on a child but there is definitely a link between violence watched by children and aggressive behavior.

Discussion

TV programming effects on preschool Children

In addition to increasing amount of violence scenes on television, it is not the only one; a sex scenes, pornography or erotica are presented on TV even more. In average it shows a sexual behavior, intercourse, nudity and other things to the audience without any limits. All these things are not should be seen by children but in fact, sometimes they are. So it is necessary to know what is the effect of it on children. First of all, there is some age differences on how interested about sex children are. In general, adolescents and teenagers are more interested in watching sex, pornography or erotica on TV than preschool children. Therefore older children are more negatively influenced by its. As the result, watching sex scenes may leads teenagers to the anxiety for watching it because of the fact that sex themes are not discussed much ...