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<title> The power of television: Its effect on children </title>
When reading the article on how to block out violence on TV I thought of the debate that has been going on in Sweden and no doubt in many other countries as well concerning whether television as a whole is bad for children and teenagers. I will also deal with issue of different kinds of violence. I all violence on TV necessarily bad for children.
Will children be harmed by watching too much TV or can it instead be for the good, that they might even learn from watching TV? These two opinions are the main stands that are usually expressed in media and by scientists. Which of them is best corresponding to reality? This is of course dependent upon the kind of program being broadcast and in what way children do watch them.
For many years it was generally considered that TV was nothing but bad for children. It's a lot better to be out playing than being stuck in front of the TV set all day. People feared, and this has also to some extent been proven and is of course quite logic, that too much TV will make people fat and lazy.
Soon the connection between television and movie violence and the increasing of violence among teenagers were being appreciated. Fighting scenes considered too explicit had of course for a long time been edited out of movies but demands for stricter rules arose as the violence got more brutal.
Those who say that television can be good for children stress the educational point of view. Used in a good way the medium is an efficient educational method. By good way is meant that the program should be on a level that does not bore the viewers and corresponds to their level of knowledge. The TV should not be used just as a way of baby-sitting were children are exposed to various kinds of programs just to keep them busy and calm. This is, I think, quite common in the states and research has shown that the effect on young children is that their attention span is shortened and they learn to accept what they see without asking any questions. A result of this is that performance in school has dropped significantly because the pupils cannot concentrate and do not ask about what they don't understand. The way it should be done is to watch the programs together with the child and discuss it so that the content of the show is not lost. It is a good method to use in class, to have the students watch a program and then recap the story in writing.
But, never the less, it all comes back to the issue of violence. I don't think that even the most stubborn television antagonist will disagree that children can learn for example foreign languages from TV shows and I also think they would regard such a thing as 'Utbildnings Radion' a good thing provided that there is no violence in the show.
Than there is the issue of what kind of violence is harmful. I don't for a moment think that the violence displayed in some cartoons with animals and the like is going to suggest to kids that they should beat each other up. It is instead the showing of the kind of unprovoked violence displayed in a majority of movies, where those knocked down immediately gets up, seemingly unharmed, and continue to fight that affects children in a way that most people would consider bad.
I would not, as many do, attribute all problems with teenage crime and violence to movie and television. You have to distinguish between the root of the problem and what set things of. TV violence can in no way be the only cause of the various problems seen today. The real problem is, as in so many other cases, the societal structures with poverty and segregation and so on. It is not until we have significant remedies for these issues that we can deal with teenage violence.
While not at all a complete solution the V-chip, as described in the article, can do a lot of good by preventing children from being exposed to excessive violence. It should be stressed, however, that although the chip is by no means a very effective way of doing this it might the best available.
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