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Children and TV: The Negative Effects of Television
By Alex Wattermann
Television has become a "member" of almost every single family on our planet. And not just an ordinary member, but a very important one, because the time spent next to it exceeds the amount of time spent together with any other family member. You do not have to apply any efforts to talk or listen to complaints while “communicating” with it. You do not have to play with your little son after a hard working day. You are SO tired! Can anybody respect that? You can simply turn the TV on and everything is done: kids are quiet, your wife is not complaining and you feel absolutely happy. It is so simple that it has become an integral part of the culture of every family. It is the only time, when a person can forget about all the family troubles and the failures of the day. The sofa opposite the TV set has become the place of “reconciliation and spiritual unity” of the family.
And instead of playing together and having emotional talks people prefer to watch an episode from a thriller. It is senseless to deny the all-embracing negative effect the existence of television has brought to our lives. But to make our point of view ultimately convincing we will introduce to your attention certain facts that people do not want to accept and often try to justify. The base of the tomorrow’s society – are children today. And on the way they develop depends how are world is going to look like tomorrow. The television negative effect facts that are well known to every single parent, but are ignored by them in order to put the responsibility for bringing up kids and showing them examples through interaction on the shoulders of somebody else. Contemporary parents work a lot, but when they come back home they are not eager to spend time with their child, the consequences of this fact are the following: kids are given to themselves and watch everything they want or TV plays a role of a babysitter. Therefore children learn moral principles from the television, where by the age of 16 they observe 100,000 violent acts and 33,000 murders.
The models of life interactions given in the television are very exaggerated and garbled. Children learn that they can gain what they want through being stronger and subordinating other people that they can become popular through killing and that even if you are a “good” guy killing is o.k. Statistics have proved that the growth of time spent next to the TV-set scales up the development of aggression. Many years before the examples of imitation for children were their own parents; now these examples come from hit-thrillers and violent films where the personages imitated are cruel, impartial and often purely negative personages. Nowadays, resulting this phenomenon, children instead of playing leap-and–frog on the open air pretend to be “terminators” and run around “killing” each other. The fact of child’s identification with a “negative” destructive image has a vital impact on the development of his or her personality. Violence becomes an ordinary way of interaction, alongside with anger.
Early exposure to sexual scenes may lead to early sexual contacts, with destroy the healthy development of a child. Young people are pressured by such an amount of sexual scenes and these scenes normalize casual sexual encounters. They do not to evaluate what they see – they take it as the reality. All the listed above may cause a trauma to a young consciousness and in combination with the violence may produce an unbalanced and unhealthy conduct. We do not have to go far away for examples when kids get guns and go to their schools shooting their teachers and schoolmates. This becomes a call to get somebody’s attention on them, the result of the TV violence and examples influences that overfills their minds. Television has also a great influence on the self-image of people watching it. We see perfectly shaped bodies hundred of times per day. All the men shown on the TV screen have big muscles and are handsome, and all the women shown are very skinny and their faces and bodies look like a complete perfection. This has caused numerous eating disorders, especially in the teenage group. Such things as bulemia, anorexia and self-mutilation became a well-spread phenomenon.
A person, especially a child that spends a lot of time next to the TV-set has a very high probability of damaging the eye mechanics and the ability to focus and pay attention. Another negative influence that is connected with the sight is the spoiling of the hearing due to the shortage of auditory stimulation. Even if the programs watched are not violent, if they are watched per hours may have a deep impact on the personality, causing psychological and physiological problems. All the hidden effects in the films and commercials subconsciously depress children and grown-ups. Another reaction of a child to the TV violence besides his aggression is fair.
A child, or a person may become so much scared of what they had observed in the television that it might cause their depression and emotional misbalance. Television prevents children from doing their homework and adults from completing their work, influencing in a very bad manner the school grades and work productivity. It lowers the overage level of physical fitness of a person, breaking the coordination. Children being attached to the TV-set loose the possibility to learn the world through real nature, games, sports, etc. They do not feel the world with all its colors and peculiarities. They do not read, and get acquainted with the unforgettable characters of Robinson Crusoe or Tom Sawyer. They do not learn the messages that a book carries inside. Due to that the personality of a person looses a very important piece and may not by called complete. Television has converted or lives into a nightmare. A nightmare where children kill not only on the TV screen and adults loose their will sitting next to the TV-set eating “junk food”. A nightmare where the time spent by a family next to the TV-set watching a soup-opera is considered to be “family time”. It is a nightmare where violent television performs the role of the parents. What else can be said to show that television destroys the healthy development of a child’s personality. All the negative effects listed above concern grown-ups as well, but through the special sensitivity of children towards the influences we wanted to show to the full the destructive power of television. It has turned our lives into an addiction that suppresses the beauty of our real life by the violent substitution. And can without any doubts be called one of the worst inventions of modern times.
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