Mental Health, Media, and Children: Media the Silent Killer of Children

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There are consequences to monitoring children television time. To every action there is a reaction. Monitoring what a child watches impacts the types of books read to children, the types of interactions parents and educators engage in with children during and after viewing television, and beliefs about education (Jennings & Walker, 2009).

Piotrowski, Jordan, Bleakley, & Hennessy 2015, suggest that “Most notably, results indicate that encouraging families to reduce their children’s nighttime television viewing is a promising direction for achieving healthier viewing amounts for children across developmental ages and demographic contexts.” By reducing the amount of television children which there is greater probability for a greater developmental health.

Content viewing also helps because sometimes children aren't nessicssarly doing what they stated they are doing. Vittrup (2009), looked at the discrepancies between what children say they are watching and what parents think their children are watching. Parents reported hat they are less likely to monitor children’s television usage. Parents with a lower social economic status are less likely to admit that their child’s behavior is being influenced by media.

Content matters. It is the reason the film industry puts disclosures on their movies i.e., PG13 and rated R. If content didn't matter Comcast would have never offered an apology to Disney viewers in NJ. In 2007 there was a malfunction in a New Jersey system it owns which led to a sex scene from adult programming appearing during a broadcast of the children's program "Handy Manny" on the Disney Channel cable television network (Eggerton, 2007).

Martins and Wilson 2012, viewed content in regards to 50 popular children television shows and the effects it has on social aggression. A content analysis was conducted to examine the portrayal of social aggression in the 50 most popular television programs among 2- to 11-year-old children. The results showed that there was social aggression in about 92% of programs. In one hour there was about 14 cases of aggression.

There was 256 episodes looked at from cable and broadcast children television. In all there were about 18 acts of verbal aggression per hour. Most of those acts were insults and name calling. “While positive outcomes outnumbered negative ones, most acts had a neutral outcome.” On the flip side the most positive action that was seen was laughter. Characters modeling verbally aggressive behaviors were typically white teenagers who showed no empathy. Males were more aggressive than females (Glascock, 2013).

Program viewing can negatively influence a child’s behavior but with the proper monitoring and education children can be shifted in the right direction. If properly facilitated preschool tv programs can help with literacy and language development. “In 1998 Whitehurst and Lonigan described two interdependent sets of skills involved in literacy acquisition: 'outside-in' or oral language skills and 'inside-out' or code-related skills. Outside-in skills support children's interpretation or understanding of print by placing written language into context through oral language. Inside-out skills focus on those skills involved in the translation of print into sounds and sounds into print (Jennings, Hooker & Linebarger 2009).”

References

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Eggerton, J. (2007). Comcast Apologizes For Porn Problem. Broadcasting & Cable, 137(19), 62.

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