Does Television Have a Negative Influence on Children?

Many statistics have shown that children are the main part of television's audience, due to many hours that they spend watching cartoons and series. But should we blame television for a bad influence on them? It is my personal and firm belief that we should.

In first place we have to consider the standards that television tries to push to the audience. In other words, most of them, especially characters from popular cartoons are violent. Nowadays heroes are extremely strong, with superpowers and they usually fight with all means of guns and powers in order to protect humanity from "evil" forces. All these standards confuse children and make them aggressive and violent in their everyday life. For example, recently I have read in newspaper that a child around 5 years old, jumped from a roof because he believed that he could fly just like Superman!

Furthermore, in many cases television has been blamed for children's antisocial behavior. To be more specific, we have to think about how many hours a child spends in front of television and how many hours spends playing with his friends or going out for walks with his parents. Then we will understand that they miss a lot of time doing almost nothing, although they could have more creative options. For instance, I believe that a child would prefer to play an interesting game than being alone watching cartoon heroes saving the world.

On the other hand, most of working mothers find television an easy way to occupy their children in order to have some available time to do their everyday laundry. However, there are many other creative ways to occupy a child, like painting or reading an interesting book with photos.

To sum up, although mothers prefer a secure and easy way to keep busy their children, it is my firm belief that we should be more careful about this option that television offers.