| Can Our Kids Survive TV? One parent's urgent alarm about the prevalence of media violence-and how to minimize the risk. By Brian Abrahams (8/16/00) We've all heard it before. Old news from high-minded experts telling us what's good for us. Let them come and entertain our kids on a rainy Saturday afternoon. Besides, hadn't we all watched Wile E. Coyote get blown up a thousand times? Moe, Larry and Curly get whacked with pipe wrenches. We turned out fine. What was so terrible about a little violence on tv? This, however, was the first time that the four major medical and psychiatric associations had come together to flatly and emphatically state the serious danger that media violence poses to kids. All of them-The American Medical Association, American Academy of Pediatrics, American Psychological Association, and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry-concurred on an important and sweeping statement about the dangers for children of media violence. (The complete statement can be read at: www.aap.org/advocacy/releases/jstmtevc.htm.) To be honest, in the past I hadn't paid much attention to the content of my kids' shows. I tried to limit total time in front of the box, but didn't worry much about what they saw. And in a time pinch, which was almost every morning and assorted weekend afternoons, I would let the TV be the "babysitter." But the medical statement on television violence and kids caught my attention and I began to do some research. What I learned has made my wife and I change our entire approach to kids' entertainment. Violence, in case we needed reminding, has gotten a lot more graphic, more frequent, and much more available. And while we can brush the warnings aside with our own anecdotal experience, more than 1000 scientific studies and reviews have concluded that significant exposure to media violence can increase the risk of aggressive behavior in children and adolescents, desensitize them to violence and to the pain of others, and make them believe that the world is a "meaner and scarier" place than it is. One study found that children who watched a lot of television violence while in elementary school tended to show a higher level of aggression when they became teenagers. By age 30 the ones who watched a lot of television when they were 8 were more likely to be arrested and prosecuted for criminal acts as adults. You've heard some version of these statistics before, but they're worth a quick re-check: * Most children in the US spend more time watching television than performing any other activity except sleeping. According to A.C. Nielsen, the average child or adolescent watches television between 21 and 23 hours per week, with the youngest children viewing the most hours per week. This does not include time spent watching movies, listening to music, playing video or computer games, or surfing the Internet. * There are three to five violent acts per hour in prime time, while violence in Saturday morning children's programming ranges from between 20 to 25 violent acts per hour. In addition, the average young viewer is exposed to over 14,000 sexual references each year. * The National Television Violence Study (NTVS), undertaken from 1994 to 1997, is the largest and most detailed study ever done of children's television. Data was gathered from 10,000 hours of children's TV programming. Among its conclusions was that the typical preschooler who watches around two hours of cartoons a day will see 10,000 violent incidents per year. * Other studies have found that by the time the average child graduates from elementary school, he or she will have viewed more than 8,000 murders and more than 100,000 other assorted violent acts on television. * By age 18, the average young person will have seen an estimated 200,000 acts of violence on television alone and an estimated 360,000 commercials. A survey reported in Harper's Magazine noted that 10-year-olds could name more brands of beer than names of American presidents. The 1750 BC Code of Hammurabi made it a crime punishable by death to sell something to a child without the involvement of an adult. In America, we've raised that selling to an art form. We all take so many precautions to keep our children safe and healthy. And what the television critic Steve Johnson referred to as "cultural toxins" won't kill your child the way E-coli or a speeding car will. Think more in terms of fatty foods and obesity. Or sunburn and skin cancer. Media violence is the same kind of slow-motion delayed damage -- but just as serious. In fact, Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas compared this new medical statement to the declaration more than four decades ago that smoking causes lung cancer. There can be no doubt now - what goes into your child's mind and heart matters as much as what goes into their stomach. Maybe more so. And it's not just about violence. Television and movies warp children's views and understanding on the use of tobacco, alcohol and other drugs; attitudes toward sex and sexual exploitation; thoughts about gender role stereotypes; and body image perceptions. We're all time-starved, stressed, and juggling roles.The TV is a free babysitter, buys desperately needed peace between siblings, and gives you a rare few minutes to yourself. Plus TV is what your children badly want. With you and your wife both working, how the heck will you police them and then fill all that time? You need to find other solutions. It is now clear that protecting our kids from the media should be on a level with dangers like accidents, poisoning, and talking to strangers on the street. This is not a familiar or comfortable thought about that friendly box in the family room and it requires a real change in how we look at our lives and our kids' habits. As with bicycle helmets or sunscreen or curfews, each family has to decide how to approach risk and the rules to minimize it. But make no mistake, there is real risk here for our children and for our society. Steps to Take: 1. Make this issue a childrearing priority. Don't wait for Congress to pass a law or the entertainment industry to police itself. (They won't and they won't.) You wouldn't let your daughter eat a bloody hamburger - don't let her spend afternoons soaking up blood and cruelty through her eyes and ears. 2. In a quiet moment, sit with your spouse or partner and talk about media exposure in terms of the kinds of children you want to raise and the adults you hope they will be. You put thought and care into their schooling and after-school activities and this matters at least as much. In fact, some kids spend more time in front of a television each week than they do in front of a teacher. (Add in summer vacations to the time total and TV beats teachers hands down.) You may even want to spend a week or two tallying what your kids watch and the percentage that is violent or non-educational. You may be in for a shock. I was when I did it. 3. When you and your wife have thought through a framework, develop rules around it. Strongly consider giving your kids a voice in the process. They will likely feel a little more comfortable, or a little less unhappy, about rules that took their views into account. The risk is some dilution of your preferences. However unlike more prosaic injunctions, like not putting marbles up your nose, this is about rules that have a basis in morality and the values essential to our own humanity. Jointly developing a family framework around your home's media quality and quantity is a great chance for a conversation about your values and the morals you hope to pass on to your children. 4. Family rules should be clear and firm and should also include limits on non-educational computer games, videocassettes, and other media that children use. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no more than 1-2 hours of quality television or videos a day for older kids and none for children under the age of 2. Require that homework and household chores should always come before entertainment. Emphasize alternative activities while limiting and focusing time spent with media. With 97 cable channels, there are worthwhile TV alternatives including history, science, civic affairs, book shows, and so on. Naturally you can't as easily control what happens when they are over at a friend's house or conning their way into the wrong movie at the Cineplex. As with all things children, your control always has built-in limits. Make your own preferences clear to your kids and use the opportunity to teach that other families' values are different from your own in this as in other things. Give your children a reason for pride in the choices of their own family and an understanding of how and why those choices were made, and maybe the lesson will take. 5. When they do watch, connect non-media activities to what they see. Fine, so you're going to let them watch that favorite cartoon about violent robots. What about also suggesting/requiring/facilitating the reading of a book about robots? Visiting a local science museum with a robot exhibit? Or building a robot out of Lego's or Popsicle sticks or even motors? Talk about how robots are used today in the real world and their limitations and abilities. 6. For most of us, entirely blocking out media is impossible and probably undesirable. More useful is teaching your children media literacy, a skill that will be useful throughout their lives and in other situations. Media literacy involves developing the skills to analyze and evaluate media and commercial content in a numbers of ways including:
7. Also valuable, especially with younger children, is teaching them to understand commercials.
8. Talk about how an event they saw on television or in a game would be in the "real" world. What would really happen if someone jumped through a window or hit someone on the head with a bottle? Explain that "good guys" like the police use their guns only when they absolutely have to and that people shot with guns don't keep running or get back up and fight more. Give examples of how you settle conflict without physical violence. 9. Keep in mind, as painful as this may be, that as in everything, you are a media role model. If you watch a lot of junk, why shouldn't they? For yourself and your kids, develop television substitutes such as reading, sports, working out, doing a hobby, and engaging your kids in imaginative play. Some additional hints: A television set in a child's bedroom is unnecessary, distracting from healthier activities, and makes enforcement of time limits or content difficult if not impossible. Consider all the entertainment input your child receives. It isn't just television. Handheld video games, television game sets, arcade games, rental movies, as well as movies in theatres. Use the technology available to you. Recent model televisions with screens 13" and larger have the 'V' chip for filtering out violent content. And some on-line services and web browsers allow parents to filter and monitor internet content. Pay attention to ratings. There are industry-wide standards for rating music, video games, and even arcade games, although a recent study found that only 40% of parents routinely looked at the ratings. Check those little emblems, although you will have to combine them with your own best judgement since each industry self-polices itself. According to the watchdog Lion and Lamb Project, the ESRB (Entertainment Software Ratings Board) industry group which rates computer and video games, considers "mild animated violence" acceptable for children ages six and up, and gives it a label of "E" for Everyone. (Their definition of "mild, animated violence" includes "characters in unsafe or hazardous acts or violent situations.") And you may find the ratings themselves instructional. The rating of "Wanton, Gratuitous Violence" as defined by the Recreational Software Advisory Council for the internet includes: "intentional aggressive violence" against "helpless" victims and includes acts such as torture and "attacks on or damage to corpses, (including) dismembering or eating a corpse." Hope you had fun tonight with your new iMac honey. Sleep tight, I'll see you in the morning. Keep in mind that the American Academy of Pediatrics strongly recommends against allowing children under 17 to view 'R' rated movies. Although the 'R' rating allows children to enter accompanied by an adult, the language, violence, and sexual content of many 'R' rated films is not appropriate for children, even when a parent is there to interpret. The following site at the American Academy of Pediatrics has numerous relevant links as well as information on children and media violence: www.aap.org/advocacy/mediamatters.htm If you want to make your opinion known to the producers of media content, the following site has links to a variety of organizations, companies, and trade associations of media content producers: www.aap.org/family/ratingsgame.htm An excellent overview article on children and media violence: http://www.aap.org/advocacy/rich999.htm Other Internet Resources on the Subject: Annenberg Public Policy Center Center for Media Education Center for Media Literacy Coalition for Quality Children's Media FCC Children's Educational Television Website Media Literacy Clearinghouse Media Literacy Online Project National Institute on Media and the Family National PTA TV Parental Guidelines Monitoring Board The following is a list of related books, put together by The Lion and Lamb Project, www.lionlamb.org. Endangered Minds: Why Our Children Don't Think Jane Healy, Simon & Schuster, 1991 Screen Smarts: A Family Guide to Media Literacy Gloria DeGaetano & Kathleen Bander, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1996 Selling Out America's Children: How America Puts Profits Before Values - And What Parents Can Do David Walsh, Bookmen, 1995 Stay Tuned! Raising MediaSavvy Kids in the Age of the Channel-Surfing Couch Potato Jane Murphy and Karen Tucker, Doubleday, 1996 Taming the Wild Tube: A Family's Guide to Television & Video Robert Schrag, University of North Carolina Press, 1990 365 TV-Free Activities You Can Do with Your Child Steve and Ruth Bennett, Bob Adams, 1996 The Plug-In Drug/Television, Children, and the Family Marie Winn, Penguin, 1985 Viewing Violence: How Media Violence Affects Your Child's and Adolescent's Development Madeline Levine, Doubleday, 1996 Brian Abrahams is the father of two and lives in Chicago.
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