Although our society is fighting against all the means of violence, television companies constantly put more and more children cartoons with heavy violent background into their programs what effects the behavior of children in a negative way.
When E.B.White in 1939 introduced a television for the first time to the public, he probably did not figure out that television would have such an impact on our society. In 1949, only two percent of homes had television. However, today only two percent of homes exist without it. If we would compare our society with the one that was one hundred years ago we would find many differences. The most marked would be the increase of the violence in those days and today. Before the fairy tales read by parents encouraged development of child's imagination and there was usually and opportunity to talk about what happened in the story, today's watching television is a passive activity that is usually done without the parent explanation and everything is left to the children's own explanation and their own understanding.
In addition, television viewing is certainly different today than it was 30 years ago. Children of today have without a doubt far more television programs available while parents are extremely busy and therefore spent lesser time with their own children than the parents did in 1970s. The most interesting and strongest relationship between television viewing is at the age of 8 and aggressive behavior at the age of 18. For instance, the research at the University of Illinois done by Leonard Eron, Ph.D., found that children who watched many hours of television violence when they were in elementary school tended to also show a higher level of aggressive behavior when they become teenagers. The children who watched a lot of television when they were eight years old were more likely to be involved in fights, conflicts, delinquency and arrested and prosecuted for criminal acts as adults.
In average, children watch 28 hours of television per week. By the time the average child reaches the age of 12, he or she has witnessed over 8,000 murders. Children's television programs actually contain five times more violence than the average prime time hour of television. Elaine Landau says: "A typical war cartoon shows in average 41 acts of violence per hour, with an attempted murder every two minutes!" Evidently more aggressive children watch more violent television and actually prefer more violent television than their less aggressive friends. Since the children are visual learners, they repeat both positive and negative behavior they see. When the children watch the superheroes beating the villains with violence, they learn that fighting is the only right method of solving the conflict. In fact, the conflicts in real life are never solved by fighting but in agreement, which is discussion or analyzing of the problem that these youth viewers were not shown and, we can say, they do not know about such a way of solution.
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