Media and Children
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Over the last few decades, parents, educators, clinicians and policymakers have become increasingly concerned about the increasingly prominent role of media in the lives of their children and their concomitant impact on their children's behavior (Steyer 4; Villani 392). According to the 1999 Kaiser Family Foundation report, entitled "Kids & Media @ The New Millenium," children aged from two and 18 "spend an average of almost five-and-a-half hours a day at home watching television, playing video games or using some form of media" (Clay "Introduction"). Because of the substantial amount of time the children and adolescents are exposed to the different forms of media, it is likely that their conceptions of the world are influenced by the content of the media, which in turn affect their behavior (Villani 397). What is most disturbing about the children's exposure to the media is the extent of violence that is present in the content presented by the media. As Potter pointed out: Public opinion polls show that people are generally critical of the media because they think that there is too much violence in the media and that this violence is causing harmful effects (3). The three-year National Television Study conducted by Federman from 1994 to 1997, which examined over 10,000 hours of programming on cable and noncable channels also indicated that young viewers were exposed to 10,000 acts of violence each year. Sixty-one percent of the shows contained violent scenes and
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f nine- to 11-year-olds who were allocated to two groups. One group played a nonviolent video game called "NBA JAM: TE," while the other group played a violent martial arts game called "MORTAL KOMBAT II." When they had finished playing the games, the children were presented with five scenarios that contained provoking incidents of an ambiguous nature. The children were asked to interpret the intentions of the provoker. The group of children that played the violent video game had the greater likelihood of attributing negative intentions to the provoker and stated that they would retaliate aggressively in the situation than the non-violent video game group (Kirsch 177-184).
More than just a short-term effect of exposure to violence, increased aggression can have long-term effects. In their 15-year study, Huesmann, Moise-Tutus Podolski and Eron (2003) found that long-term exposure to media violence from childhood could lead to aggression in young adulthood. The participants who were extensively exposed to TV violence during their childhoods,
"identifi[ed] with violent TV characters and perceiv[ed] TV violence as real" exhibited aggressive behavior in their adulthood (cited in Center for the Advancement of Health "The Facts
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Approximate Word count = 3167
Approximate Pages = 13 (250 words per page)
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