The Harmful Effects of Television
By: Hamzah Jameel,
Staff Writer
Watching too much TV is destructive for children. The University of Michigan’s researchers demonstrated that watching violent media can affect the willingness of children to help others in need. It also affects other sides of their personality. Parents must limit the time their children watch TV every day because it affects the children’s brains, behavior, and sleep routines.
TV can affect the brains of the children as well as their behavior. Scientists do not have a clear idea about how television affects early brain developments. Some studies say that watching TV may bring future problems like ADHD—Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder—a common disorder that affects up to 10% of schoolchildren. Under the age of two, talking, singing, reading, and playing are much more important activities than watching a TV show. These activities help develop the brains of children and improve their educational skills. On the other hand, programs like market toys and fast food advertisement are strongly opposed by pediatricians. Advertisements cutting TV shows can be extremely harmful to the brains of the little audience because this interruption keeps on cutting the concentration, which limits and trains the brains to a short attention span. These ads, moreover, target little children and make them the easy prey of advertisement.
In addition, aggressive and violent scenes affect the young viewers. An average American will have watched 200,000 violent acts and 16,000 murder acts by the age of 18. Violent acts are normally accompanied with humor to make them more appealing to the viewers. They are often a way for good characters to solve their problems. Normally, the good character beats the bad characters. Consequently, the kids will try to be the good heroes and will try to imitate the violence they see on the screen. Since the children below the age of eight cannot differentiate fantasy from reality, TV can affect their behavior and the way they think about life tremendously.
Television can also affect the ideas of the children, causing sleep problems. Nightmares, anxiety, staying-alone phobia, withdrawing from friends, dropping or missing school, or having sleep problems are mostly caused by TV watching among children. Scary-looking characters frighten children between the ages of two and eight and cause nightmares. Besides, children between the ages of eight and twelve who watch violence are mostly scared to be the victim of a violent act or a natural disaster. All these problems can affect regular sleep routines and cause disorders in sleeping, which in turn can affect academic progress and achievement at school. Teenagers who watch three or more hours of violence are at the risk of suffering from sleep disorder by early adulthood.
Together we can limit the harmful effects of TV on children. Parents who care for their children’s well-being should limit their children’s time of television watching for it can harmfully affect their brains, behavior, and sleep routines.
Works Cited
University of Michigan Health System. August 2010. University of Michigan. 23 April 2013. <http://www.med.umich.edu/yourchild/topics/tv.htm>.