Media and Kids

Complaints to: Collin media@rc5.us

Do your children spend too much time watching TV, surfing the net, or playing video games? Are these things worth worrying about?

Worrying? No. But it is worth tracking the time spent and setting limits on these activities, because of the effects on children's brain development and behavior.

Here are some of the issues:

1. For healthy brain development, very young children need to be held, played with, and talked to. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends skipping TV entirely for children under two, in favor of these activities:

   ...research on early brain development shows that babies and toddlers have a critical need for direct interactions with parents and other significant caregivers... for healthy brain growth. Therefore, exposing such young children to television programs should be discouraged." [*AAP]

2. Children and young adolescents are less alert after watching television; these effects may last for hours [*RK1]. Further, it's harder to concentrate after watching TV:

   The finding suggests that spending time with television might make concentration more difficult afterward. In contrast, in an identical analysis of 25 similar reading sequences, it was found that difficulty of concentration decreased after reading from the level before or during. [*RK2]

   In other words, your kids will have an easier time concentrating after reading a book; if they watch TV during their break, they'll have a harder time concentrating than before!
3. Violent images, and especially violent video games, promote violent behavior and insensitivity. "The fact is that media violence primes children to see killing as acceptable." [*DG1] These effects continue into adulthood, according to a recent study at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research. [*SMCT1]

   In the myriad studies done over the last four decades, experts have found three basic negative effects from exposure to screen violence: increased aggression, fear, and insensitivity to real-life and screen violence. [*DG2]

   One frightening aspect of this link is best explained in the authors' own words, a condensed version of which follows.

   The military learned in World War II that there is a vast gulf between an ordinary citizen and someone who can aim and fire a gun with intent to kill, even in war. Soldiers in that war spent a lot of time firing their guns into the air or not at all. In fact, the firing rate was a mere 15% among riflemen, which, from a military perspective, is like a 15% literacy rate among librarians.
        Today soldiers learn to fire at realistic, man-shaped silhouettes that pop up in their field of vision. Soldiers and police officers experience hundreds of repetitions of this. Later, when they're out on the battlefield or walking a beat and somebody pops up with a gun, reflexively they will shoot, and shoot to kill.
        These devices are used extensively; their introduction is undeniably responsible for increasing the firing rate from 15-20% in World War II to 95% in Vietnam.
        Now these simulators are in our homes and arcades - in the form of violent video games! One of the most effective and widely used simulators developed by the United States Army is nothing more than a modified Super Nintendo game (it closely resembles the popular game Duck Hunt).
        Even when Doom is played with a mouse, it is still a good enough combat simulator that the Marine Corps uses a modified version of it (called Marine Doom) to teach recruits how to kill. Its primary value is in developing the will to kill by repeatedly rehearsing the act until it feels natural. [*DG3,DG4]

   For even more realism, "Eric Harris reprogrammed his edition of Doom so that it looked like his neighborhood, complete with the houses of the people he hated" [*DG4] If you have any violent video games in your home, STOP TEACHING OUR KIDS TO KILL will change the way you think about them.

   A cartoon from the Palo Alto Daily News (May 30, 2003), poignantly illustrates this point.

4. As children get older, their attention is drawn toward video games and virtually enhanced experiences -- so much so that they find "real" reality boring, and withdraw from it in favor of the "plugged-in" world.

   "If I didn't make him eat, sleep, and go to school, he would be at that thing 24 hours a day!" - mother of an 11-yr-old boy [*JH1]

   Why spend thousands of bucks to visit a tropical rain forest, trek and sweat in the heat, endure leech bites... and see very few animals from very far away, when you can practically pet gargantuan-sized images on an IMAX screen for 10 bucks? [*RD1]

   When children (or adults) spend lots of time in a virtual world, preferring it to the real world, how can they, or we, grow in love, joy, peace, patience, kindness... or any other fruit of the Spirit?

Now what?

As for practical steps to take in our homes, that will be the subject of a future report. I'd love to hear your success stories!

[DG1] Lt. Col. Dave Grossman (USA ret.) and Gloria DeGaetano, Stop Teaching our Kids to Kill: a call to action against TV, movie & video game violence (New York: Crown/Random House, 1999) p.7

[DG2] op. cit., p.26

[DG3] op. cit., pp.72-74

[DG4] op. cit., p.76

[JH1] Jane Healy, Endangered Minds: Why our children don't think (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), p.205

[RD1] Richard DeGrandpre, Digitopia: the look of the new digital you (New York: AtRandom.com, 2001), p.11, quoting Stephen Jay Gould from Forbes ASAP October 2000

[RK1] Robert Kubey and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Television and the Quality of Life: How Viewing Shapes Everyday Experience (Hillsdale NJ: Erlbaum, 1990), p.124

[RK2] Kubey, op. cit., p.123

[SMCT1] Malcolm Ritter [Associated Press], Study links kids' viewing of TV violence to adult aggression, San Mateo County Times March 10, 2003 [oops, lost the page#]