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<title> Televisions effect on children </title>
Children today spend hours everyday watching television. With the cable TV available they can watch 24 hours a day. Parents often work long hours leaving the children on their own in the afternoons, free to choose programs on their own. Starting at young ages, children have a tendency to choose programs with a lot of action and violence and this has begun to show results. In this essay I will discuss the negative effects of watching violence on television.

Looking at my own children I can see a clear difference between my oldest son and my youngest. I spent the first four years at home with my oldest son which gave me the opportunity to talk a lot with him, to play with him and to influence what he watched on television. My younger son, on the other hand, was only 18 months when he started at a daycare center and I haven't had the same possibility to influence his choice of TV programs. He has been watching the same shows as his older brothers which is mostly cartoons with a lot of action, like "Spiderman" or "Batman". I have tried to interest him in quality shows like "Fem myror", which my oldest son loved, but he does not appreciate programs like this because they are too slow and demand more of him as a viewer. He has never been interested in anything but cartoons with a lot of action and heroes. Today he is four years old and into computers as well, they even have a computer at his daycare center. 

What I can see as a result of this, is that he does not play in the same way my oldest son used to play, with cars and lego. Instead he takes on his costumes and pretends he is spiderman or superman, using their language and gestures. What this will lead to in the future is hard to say, but I do think children today are a lot different than children 10-15 years ago.

Teachers certainly see the difference. Children have a difficulty sitting still, concentrating on their schoolwork. It's difficult for them to focus on instructions longer than a few minutes. When they learn to read, they don't experience the same exciting feeling of a new world opening up to them, as my generation did. I have made it a routine with my sons, that they read every night, but even though they do appreciate the books, they would probably choose television, if given a choice. Children also pick up a lot of vocabulary from television. The language children use in schools today would not have been tolerated when I was a child. They use a lot of swearwords, not only among each other but to teachers and other adults as well. 

At recess they often don't know what to do. They haven't learned the traditional games or maybe they just aren't interested. When they don't play games they have more time to walk around and pick fights with each other. They don't even fight the same way anymore. Influenced by television they gang up on each other, using kicks instead of fists and sometimes even knives or other weapons. 

From the United States and England, we've heard terrifying stories about children killing children. Very often these stories have involved weapon, being brought to schools. So far I haven't heard about shootings in Swedish schools but last year in Sweden, two young boys killed a 4 year old, during play. This must be taken seriously. The fact that they were playing and that the game got out of hand proves that small children cannot separate between play and reality. Their games reflect what they see on television and they are not old enough to know when a game becomes life threatening.

Television has brought many positive things to our lives. But there is no doubt that for our children the effect has not all been positive. Programs with violence influence the games children play, the language they speak and their ability to concentrate in school. But I also think that the adults surrounding the children have to take on some of the responsibility. Violence on TV would not have such a big influence on our children if it wasn't for the fact that television has come to compensate for time spent with adults. By spending more quality time with our children and by watching television together with them, talking about what we see, maybe we can soften the negative effects of television.
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