Television Viewing and Violence in Children

Television Viewing and Violence in Children

Television has become a kind of a modern, technological 'babysitter' for children. It is not unusual for even very young children to have unsupervised television time. Because of the famous studies conduced by Bandura which suggested that children are apt to mimic observed behaviors and imitate the behaviors of others (even when they are not directly praised for doing so) many researchers have attempted to draw a causal link between violent television viewing and actual violent behavior in children. They also argue that children are desensitized to violence through repeated viewing of violent programming. This notion of desensitization is supported by studies which found that measures of arousal in children declined upon repeated exposure to violent content. Children exposed to violent television also seem more apt to articulate a suspicious view of the world (275-276).

However, it is somewhat problematic to draw a direct causal link between children enacting serious violent behavior in the real world and experimental studies in the laboratory. Violence is a complex expression of human behavior, and reducing it to a simplistic factor like television exposure is almost impossible under 'real world' conditions, since so many unaccounted-for factors can affect behavior. Although there may be a correlation between violent behavior and television viewing, it may be likely that parents who allow unlimited and supervised television viewing are less involved in their children's lives, and these households may be more chaotic and violent in nature. Additionally, children that willingly select violent television programming may have a genetic predisposition to be fascinated with violence.

There is also the question of what constitutes 'violence' on television in general. Even fairy tales have violent elements -- as do Roadrunner cartoons. Studies of violence on television tend to make a broad-based characterization of 'violence,' but does this only mean extremely brutal violence? Violence without consequences? What about violence on the news? What about how violence is dealt with by parents and educators? If adults 'role model' appropriate behaviors and talk about the violence seen on television, turning the experience into a teachable moment, is this form of violence necessarily a bad influence? Parental warmth (or coldness) and parental permissiveness are two of the most important factors in determining children's future behavior. Perhaps this can be also seen in regards to children's consumption of violent and even non-violent television viewing (224). There may be a complex relationship of cause and effect. More distanced parents may be more apt to allow children to watch large amounts of violent television, and are also less likely to talk about what the children see and to instill moral values about the content in their children. It may be that not only are children consuming more television than in the past, but they are also not talking about the values expressed on television with a parental role model.