Week 11: Is media violence harmful for children’s development?

http://www.naeyc.org/files/naeyc/file/positions/PSMEVI98.PDF

A simple model can adequately show the mind of a child: a sponge put under water. It takes in, registers many, if not all, factors surrounding it, no matter what these are. In result children are often exposed to sources of various kinds, so how easy is it for them to learn and later re-enact certain negative behaviours? Looking at data made available by the Television Violence Monitoring Programme 61% of examined American TV programmes feature some violence and 75% of these scenes are not followed by punishment. In a world that has become more and more accustomed to the existence of violence what does this mean for children in terms of their development and possible harmful effect on their morals in the future?

In today’s world we no longer have the choice of being aware or not of world and local news: additionally, the truth is that most tragic and terrifying stories attract the most publicity. Off course, if we look in a broad historical perspective crime rates and danger have substantially been lowered over the last years, we feel safer, the standard of living is much higher and so on. However much more than a hundred years ago we live our daily lives surrounded by very graphic photographs: those of corpses, constantly being informed about death polls in regard to stories of natural disasters but also mass murderers, serial killers. Today it is not only in cartoons or movies but also in the news that kids often see violence. We must put forward some distinctions: media can be divided into passive and active. The first includes television, movies, cinema, music and it is what I have mentioned so far: the media we are exposed to in a way involuntarily, sources easily accessible. 

The active media include video games and the Internet, both of which today are most likely to have the biggest negative effect on teenagers and children between the ages of 7-12. The influence of passive media is like a subconscious layer put down in early infancy, when children are not necessarily yet capable of playing video games or accessing a computer but they already have interactions with the television. For such a small child distinguishing what is fictional and what factual is nearly impossible: it simply registers what it sees and assumes it has its reflection in reality.  The data and studies behind the actual effect of media violence on children is very scarce. Not enough studies have been carried out, mostly because of ethical issues that arise: it is impossible to conduct such experiments if there is any possibility of negatively affecting a child’s natural development and most likely in this case there would be. Another problem often faced by psychological experiments that try to avoid criticism for being unethical is the situation where establishing a causal connection is not possible, so there is not enough evidence to back up the study and its results. Then also comes the case of what is VIOLENCE, how to recreate it adequately in a study. Groups with the highest risk could be mentally unstable, lonely, bullied children with difficulties fitting in, or children with a hard family situation: in general, kids with little or no support from the world and their close ones.

In the end, even if violence in the media does not directly effect every child’s behaviour, it most definitely does not go unnoticed: if even only somewhere deep in the subconscious, the images remain and they may be ground for future tragedies. It is impossible to completely get rid of the violence children are seeing, but instead of the trend to leave kids to their own, let them play games for a completely different age group or watch TV unattended, it would be better to show them goals and strong moral rules from the beginning of their lives, so that by the time they grow up the only side of violence in the media they will find interesting is it‘s entertaining quality.