Children And Tv Essay, Research Paper

TV rots the senses in the head!

It kills the imagination dead!

It clogs and clutters up the mind!

It makes a child so dull and blind.

He can no longer understand a fantasy,

A fairyland!

His brain becomes as soft as cheese!

His powers of thinking rust and freeze.

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Thanks to the technological development, TV raids in the households much easier. Furthermore TV is now unjustified considered as an accessible easy and simple meaning of relaxation and entertainment. As a result more and more children are spending most of their childhood in front of the TV set facing the entire negative and dangerous physical and mental consequences.Tv affects children s behavior very much. It affects the way they play, the way they dress, their humor and their perception of family life and community. So the T.V editors must pay attention to the quality of the programs they show.

On the other hand, there are some people who believe that T.V. affects children positively. They have this opinion because they are based on some right points, which practically not respond to their ideas. They claim that T.V. educates, entertain and informs people, so the children are informed, entertained and educated as well by it. So they thing that T.V. makes a combination of entertainment and education which is useful to the children.

The worst TV does is that exposes children too much to violence. Extensive viewing of television violence is children causes greater aggressiveness. Sometimes watching a simple violent program can increase aggressiveness. Children who view shows, in which violence is very realistic, frequently repeated or unpunished, are more likely to imitate what they see. So children may behave in harmful ways toward others. It s more common to find violence depicted as attractive and social acceptable so children when they use violence are proud of it and they like to harm people. Many studies have been conducted to prove that TV violence attracts children but one of the most important was done by Albert Bandura (Bandura, Ross, and Ross 1963) demonstrates how easily a child can be influenced by viewing aggression. He and his colleagues observed preschoolers and a continued situation that included aggressive behavior. His study consisted of four groups. A control group was set up for this experiment. It contained children who had not witnessed any events involving a Bobo doll a toy clown. The other three groups had witnessed Bobo being verbally and physically abused by different figures such as a live model, a filmed model, and a female dressed in a cat costume. All the children had been irritated by the fact that their toys were taken away from them. This made the children more prone to use aggressive behaviour. The children were then put in a playroom with the Bobo doll. Out of the four groups that were involved, three exemplified aggressive behaviour toward the Bobo doll. The exception was the control group that had not witnessed any violence. This experiment supports the theory that after observing violent behaviour, children are more likely to imitate the aggressive acts of the characters involved.

Moreover, if children watch a lot of violence on TV in real life they can tolerate a lot of violence too. For example a child who watches violent programs if it sees two men fighting on the street, not only it won t interfere to separate them, but it might not even notice them fighting because it seems something normal to it. For that reason they also become less sensitive to the pain and suffering of others, and they don t care for anyone except themselves. There is another study that proves this negative effect of violence. Drabmant and Thomas did this study in 1974. Forty-four boys and girls in third and fourth grade were divided into two groups. One group saw a violent western movie and the other did not see any movie at all. Afterwards the children were asked to Baby-sit two younger by watching them on TV. The two children became progressively violent toward each other and this is where the experiment gets interesting. The researchers found the children who had seen the western movie waited longer to get an adult to her the two violent children than did the children who had not seen the movie. This suggests that the children who had been predisposed to violence behaviour accepted the behaviour the witnessed between the two children that they were babysitting as more normal . Another impossible effect of viewers is to get fearful of becoming victims of violence; they may begin to perceive the world around them as mean and dangerous. That makes sense because if children watch some situations with victims of their age the fear that the same thing will happen to them. For example, my younger sister Vicky at the age of fifteen she watched a movie with a little girl which firstly was kidnapped and finally murdered. From that day and on for about two years, she couldn t walk alone during night hours, even for small distances.

Furthermore, children who watch TV learn and want to be consumers at an ever-earlier age. Today two and three year old children request toys regularly. They know exactly what they want and the brand names as well. This happens with other goods too, such as clothes, food and drinks. If young children watch on TV there favourite movie star wearing a current brand and consuming a certain thing immediately children want to copy that star and they start wearing the same clothes and consuming the same products as he or she does. It s worth to mention an example how a product or an idea which is shown on TV becomes an obsession a month ago I went to the super market with my ten year old cousin to buy some certain things fir a dinner. Suddenly I saw him running to the sector with the games. As long as I was responsible for him I had to follow him because he shouldn t be alone. When I reached him he showed me a yellow cued funny creature that looked like a teddy bear. I wanted to know what was that so I asked him. He told me that it was Pikachu the best pokemon in the world, and he also said that he wanted to buy it. I said to him that we hadn t a lot of money to buy it so he had to leave it. Immediately he started crying and screaming that he wanted that Pokemon. I had two solutions: the first one was to buy the Pokemon and my cousin would stop crying; the second solution was to hit him until he would stop. Of course I chose the first solution because the second was very humiliating. Moments like that people start realising that TV has a great power that should be limited. A psychologist named Berevle Huston said that: At a ideological level the goal of {cinema} is to reinforce the unified subject as an intermediate step in reproducing a certain social world. This is not the definitive work of TV. Its function is more directly linked to consumption, which it promotes by shattering the imaginary possibility over and over repeatedly reopening the gap of desire. (Marshakinder, Playing with power in movies,TV and Videogames. P. 39)

TV also effects negatively and the mind of children. Reading a book, working to the nature or having a conversation with another human being, where one takes time to ponder thing and self create are far more educational than watching TV. The TV is replacing the valuable experience of human conversations, story telling reading books and exploring nature. Viewing TV represent an endless, purposeless, physically unfulfilling activity for a child. TV attracts children to be concentrated on it and it makes them want more without ever being satisfied. While reading a book the child s mind creates its own picture and has time to think about them. This thought could actually lead to ideas that inspire a child to action. Except the fact that TV does not to give time for this higher level of thinking that inspires deeds, it also limits the imagination. Watching TV often eliminates the port of the brain that can make sense of, analyse, rationalise what children are seeing. Children get used to not using their imaginative thinking at all, and they don t exercise that part of the brain that creates the pictures. Creating pictures is not just entertaining, but the foundation of our dreams and higher thoughts. Among these TV does not give time to children, even to study and read their homework. They prefer watching TV all day long and go to school unlearned. The outcome is that the children of this generation are not educated well and then become stupid with short imagination. The ironic thing is that those children, in few years they are going to be the leaders of our world and with this principles I m sure that they are going to destroy the world. A human who is stupid, lazy and cannot concentrate on his duties well, cannot decide soberly for the decisions of his own life. How he will be able to decide about the destiny and the future of the whole nation.

Before watching TV, children would be outside in the nature, content to look at bugs, make things with sticks and rocks, and play in the water and sand. Today children are stuck in front of the TV set and they are restricted from outdoor activities. Children become less and less sociable, because they don t want to go out and meet new friends and play with them. The old traditional games, like hide and seek have completely disappeared. They have stopped forming teams and organizing football matches between neighbourhoods. They have lost their interest in having Sunday picnics, with sandwiches and refreshments, amongst nature. They prefer solitary entertainment. They prefer watching T.V.and playing video games. This results to lack of organizing, becoming sociable, and learning to communicating with other people of different races, age and culture. The child won t be able to make a strong and healthy personality.

Moreover, more ideals are created in children s minds, because T.V. shows solutions to different situations and problems, which cannot be applied, in real life. It shows the wrong answers to family crises. These include seeking comfort with alcohol, drugs post-marital affairs, and even suicide. In the real world, family problems should be coped with proper conversation, and parental guidance, something one hardly sees on television. Furthermore, excess T.V. passes wrong messages to children, for example, a girl with blonde hair may feel that she is not as bright as other dark haired girls when she sees a series which shows and points out a blonde girl who acts totally stupid. Television also induces problematic and tottery characters as heroes of life and trendy people. Children want to imitate them and they adopt their kind of problematic characters. There are also the idols which children admire who are supposed to be funny, with a great sense of humour. My personal opinion of them is that they are not funny at all. I find them to be ridiculous instead and I believe they cause the child to not sense what fun really is.

Finally, I tend to believe that T.V. affects children negatively physically as well. First of all the children who are exposed to too much T.V. may easily become overweight. An exercise physiologist at John Hopkins School of Medicine said that long bouts of television have two ways of making children fatter. One is that they burn less energy lying in front of the T.V. watching sports an athletic events instead of going out and playing them themselves. The other is that while watching their favourite programmes, they usually snack on different fattening goodies and snacks. These results to a much higher intake of fat and calories, and to a much slower metabolism, which makes them, gain much more weight. Besides being overweight, health problems can occur .Fat children often get teased by others which depresses them and makes them stay indoors and eat more finding comfort in food and T.V. Another physical affect television has on people in general is damage it cause ones eyesight. The radiation, which T.V. emits, is known to cause problems to peoples vision. Measures such as, how many hours one should be able to watch T.V. daily, what distance one should sit from the screen, or wearing special glasses which protect the eyes and stop them from tiring.

The conclusion to all these, which are mentioned above, is the harmful character of television which affects negatively children physically and mentally. Even though television has invaded our lives and has become an essential part of it, parents shouldn t remain passive about it; instead they should find the strength to resist this alluring mean of communication and entertainment, which provoke all these negative consequences.