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<title> TELEVISION- A PART OF CHILDREN'S UPBRINGING </title>
Television is one of our most successful media. It is a good information medium and it is nice from an entertaining point of view, which children usually realize. They often start to watch television at a very early age. Obviously, television is a part of children's upbringing, which is good for their language development. The intimidating thing is that there are too much violence in television, which not should be seen by children. In USA they use the V chip to protect children from the violent parts. Here in Sweden we don't have these and therefore, I think parental responsibility is very important.

To begin with, I think that television is of great importance for children's language development. By watching television, they listen to the spoken language in conversations and also to the written language in text reading, which give them the opportunity to adopt the language. My young cousin, for instance, often use phrases and expressions she has heard in some television programme. I think this is rather common for young viewers, so they can learn a lot by watching television. 

Another thing, which makes television into a bad thing though, is that children more easily accept violence if they watch it on television every day. Some children may not realize that if they shoot a friend in his/ her stomach, for example, he/ she would probably not run away or not even survive. So they make crimes without thinking about the consequences. Naturally, television influences viewers and for the young ones, it could be difficult for them to see the differences between television's world and the real world. 
 
Lastly, can we protect children from the violence on television? In USA they have tried to solve this problem with the so-called V chip; an antiviolence chip. Ginia Bellafante writes about this solution in the article "Locking out violence". Here she describes that TV-programmes are rated on a scale of violence from 1-4, so if you install the V chip you decide what level of violence you are able to watch. For me, it seems like a fantastic solution. But the V chip just matches the TV-set you have installed it in, so if you have more than one TV it becomes very expensive. Bellafante discusses this in her article and she says: "...parents surely won't replace every one".

However, this high-tech solution doesn't exist in Sweden, but we have the violent films late in the evenings, which precede with a recommended minimum age of the viewers. I don't think this is enough, so parental responsibility is a necessity; parents should decide what programmes children watch. A documentary film about the second world war, for instance, could be a afternoon television programme and allowed for children, so the young viewer will maybe watch the programme and be exposed to too much violence. Therefore, children should not watch television alone. An adult person could explain for the child and answer the child's questions about the context. Owing to this, I think it is necessary to select what parts children are able to watch or not.

To sum up, I think that the most important thing when it comes to watching television, is parental responsibility, because we cannot give the responsibility to the children themselves. Firstly, should parents help the children to select what are suitable for them to watch or not. Secondly, should parents also watch television together with children in case they have some thoughts or become frighten. Television programmes without the violent parts, are of great importance for a pedagogical upbringing, because children develop their language by listening to and watching television.
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