Violence in America
...plained above, after viewing television violence the world becomes bland in comparison. Children start to need to create violence to keep their self satisfied. Television alone is responsible for 10% of youth violence. (Senate Judiciary Committee Staff Report, 1999.) Also children find the violent characters on television fun to imitate. Children do imitate the behavior of models such as those portrayed in television, movies, etc. They do so because the ideas that are shown to them on television are more attractive to the viewer than those the viewer can think up himself. Not only does television violence affect 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 unnaturally speed up the impact of the adult world on the child. This can force the child into a kind of premature maturity. As a 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. 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, an insidious influence that upsets moral balance and makes a child prone to thoughts of eating a gun or killing someone else. 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 non-thinker. As you can see, television violence can disrupt a child's learning and thinking ability which will cause life long problems. If a child cannot do well in school, his or her whole future is at stake. The combination of aggression and continued television viewing leads to poor academic standings as well as unpopularity. These can cause more aggression and a vicious cycle begins to spin. Because there is a great deal of violence in both adult and children's programming, just limiting the number of hours children watch television will probably reduce the amount of aggression they see. Parents should watch at least one episode of the programs their children watch. That way they'll know what their children are watching and be able to talk about it with them. When they see a violent incident, parents can ...