Television Through the Eyes of Adolescents

What has the world come to these days? It often seems like everywhere one looks, violence rears its ugly head. We see it in the streets, back alleys, school, and even at home. In many peoples living rooms there sits an outlet for violence that often goes unnoticed. It is the television, and the children who view it are often pulled into its realistic world of violence scenes with sometimes devastating results. Each week, children spend a whopping 28 hours watching TV (Programming Behavior). Much research has gone into showing why children are so mesmerized by this big glowing box and the action that takes place within it. Research shows that it is definitely a major source of violent behavior in children. The research proves time and time again that aggression and television viewing do go hand in hand. We can and should get angry with the companies that market violence to our children, but we should be just as angry with the parents who allow their kids to become the companies' prey. If merchants shape our kids' beliefs and values, it is because we let them (Merchants of Cool). The truth about television violence and children has been shown. Some are trying to fight this problem. Others are ignoring it and hoping it will go away. Still others don't even seem to care. However, the facts are undeniable. Many studies have been carried out and all the results point to one conclusion: Television violence causes children to be violent and the effects can be life-long. The information can't be ignored. Violent television viewing does affect children. The effects have been seen in a number of cases. In New York, a 16-year-old boy broke into a cellar. When the police caught him and asked him why he was wearing gloves he replied that he had learned to do so to not leave fingerprints and that he discovered this on television. In Alabama, a nine-year-old boy received a bad report card from his teacher. He suggested sending the teacher poisoned candy as revenge as he had seen on television the night before. In California, a seven-year-old boy sprinkled ground-up glass into the lamb stew the family was to eat for dinner. When asked why he did it he replied that he wanted to see if the results would be the same in real life as they were on television (Howe 72). These are just a few examples of how television affects children. It must be pointed out that children watching violent television directly caused all of these situations. Television violence not only affects the child's youth, but it can also affect his or her adulthood. Some psychologists and psychiatrists feel that continued exposure to such violence might speed up the impact of the adult world on the child. This can force the child into a kind of premature maturity. As the child matures into an adult, he can become bewildered; have a greater distrust towards others, a superficial approach to adult problems, and even an unwillingness to become an adult (Carter 14). Television violence can destroy a young child's mind. The effects of this violence can be long lasting, if not never-ending. For some, television at its worst, is an assault on a child's mind, it upsets moral balance and makes a child prone to aggressive behavior as it warps his or her perception of the real world. Others see television as an unhealthy intrusion into a child's learning process, substituting easy pictures for the discipline of reading and concentrating and transforming the young viewer into a hypnotized nonthinker (Langone 48). As you can see, television violence can disrupt a child's learning and thinking ability. If a child cannot do well in school, his or her whole future is at stake. Why do children like the violence that they see on television? Since media violence is much more vicious than that which children normally experience, real-life aggression appears bland by comparison (Dorr 127). The violence on television is able to be more exciting and interesting than the violence that is normally viewed on the streets. Instead of just seeing a police officer handing a ticket to a speeding violator, he can beat the offender bloody on television. However, children don't always realize this is not the way things are handled in real life. They come to expect it, and when they don't see it happening in the real world, life becomes bland and they feel the need for violence. Causing them to create the violence that their mind craves.

The television violence can cause actual violence in a number of ways. As explained above, after viewing television violence the world becomes less thrilling in comparison. The child needs to create violence to keep them satisfied (Dorr 127). Children also find the violent characters on television fun to imitate. Children imitate the behavior of the models portrayed in television, movies, etc., because the ideas that are shown to them on television are more attractive to the viewer than those the viewer can think up themselves (Brown 98). This has been widely seen with the advent of the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, Pokemon, Dragon Ball Z, etc. Young children cannot seem to get enough of these fictional characters and will portray them often.

Violence caused by children is apparent in larger cities. Aggressive behavior is more acceptable in the city, where a child's popularity rating with classmates is not hampered by his or her aggression (Huesmann 166). In the bigger cities, crime and violence is inevitable, expected and, therefore, is left unchecked and out of line.

A lot of research on the topic of children and television violence has been conducted. All of the results seem to point in the same direction. There are undeniable correlations between violent television and aggression. These results were obtained in a survey of London schoolchildren