Does violence on television cause children to be violent? There are many people that say this is true but there are also many people who believe to be false. We live in an era where both parents are often working and children have more unsupervised time so it's easy for them to watch different kinds of shows without parental consent. Some people contend that it's not what children watch on TV but how easily obtainable guns are. .
The people who say violence on television does cause children to be violent site psychological research. They say four major effects of seeing violence on television are:.
Becoming "immune" to the horror of violence; .
Gradually accept violence as a way to solve problems; .
Imitate the violence they observe on television; and .
Identify with certain characters, victims and/or victimizers. ( © 2001 American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry).
The average American child will have watched 100,000 acts of televised violence, including 8,000 depictions of murder, by the time he or she finishes sixth grade. Numerous studies have been done to show the correlation of violence in TV and children's propensity to be violent from watching it. George Gerbner, at the University of Pennsylvania, showed that children's television shows contain about 20 violent acts each hour and that children who watch a lot of television are more likely to think that the world is a mean and dangerous place. In another study done at Pennsylvania State University, about 100 pre-school children were observed both before and after watching television, while some watched cartoons that had many aggressive and violent acts; others watched shows that didn't have any kind of violence. The researchers noticed differences between the children who watched the violent shows and those who watched non-violent ones. Lastly University of Michigan psychologists Leonard Eron and Rowell Huesmann have followed the viewing habits of a group of children for decades and they found that watching violence on television is the single factor most closely associated with aggressive behavior-more than poverty, race, or parental behavior.
