Can Watching Cartoons Have a Violent Effect on Children

¶ … Watching Cartoons Have a Violent Effect on Children?

What children see from others affect their perceptions of things. This is what most people believe, considering that children are naive. Thus, their judgments on what is right and wrong are oftentimes based on what they see around their environment. Hence, it is the usual suggestion of psychologists to show good examples to children. The question is, what about the things around them, which can be the source of influences, which we cannot control?

One of the components that is said to affect people, especially the children, is the media. This includes the news, the radio, and the television. To children, specifically, it is the programs that they watch in television that can have large influence to them. This is one argument though that many psychologists would like to prove or disprove. As a focus of this paper, we will try to review researches and studies to answer this argument, specifically the question "Can Watching Cartoons Have a Violent Effect on Children?

There are different themes of the different cartoon shows in television. Like movies played by real people, cartoons have themes of drama, action, comedy, as well as cartoons that provide good moral values and lessons to children. The question of whether cartoons have a violent effect on children can perhaps be answered by these themes of cartoon shows. Cartoons that present stories on good moral character can be considered as not detrimental to the personal attitude of children. If we are to watch such kinds of cartoon shows, it can be realized that they can, in contrast to violence, enhance the conduct of children due to the moral lessons of the stories. However, on other types of cartoon shows like action stories, this is where the question of violence can be applied.

From Peters and Blumberg's (2002) study, whether cartoons can have good or bad effect on children is hard to identify. This is because there are many measures that must be considered, plus considering the differences in children's level of how they get influenced easily. However, as generally found by Peters and Blumberg (2002), television cartoons are less likely to have a violent effect on children. They indicated that

"However, young children may be less inclined to emulate violent actions seen on television than currently thought. Research indicates that preschoolers have limited comprehension of television content but relatively sophisticated moral reasoning."

Moreover, Peters and Blumberg indicated the following reason why children are less likely to be affected with television's violence.

"One contributing factor to this inability to transfer knowledge from media to daily life is children's understanding of reality vs. fantasy."

On the other hand, in contrast to Peters and Blumberg's findings, Nathanson and Cantor (2000), found that watching violent scenes in television can have a tremendous effect on the behaviour of children, particularly on their aggressiveness. According to them,