Television and Children

There are questions that remain unanswered. And when there are answers, no-one listens to them, or they seem to pass unnoticed.

Parents complain about television. Leaving their innocent children to such a bad influence? But they deceive themselves, shirking from the truth that without television, parents today would not know how to stand their children.

One thing is the beautiful experience of having a child, being parents, and another thing is educating a child: parents have to recognize that without television they would not have a moment of peace. And if, as often happens, children cause trouble and their relationships with their elders deteriorate, you can blame the television programs; also, the government because it does not obligate such programs to be fully educational and edifying. “It is an oft repeated half-truth that television is responsible for violence by young people.”

Ignacio Burk said this on the subject in his column for the Nacional “Hourglass”. He analyzes the problem of drawing one’s own conclusions.

It is known, through many studies that have been performed, that in reality television increases human aggressiveness from infancy. Although it does not only affect children, it also affects adults.

I remember now that at the Latin American Congress of Psychiatry (APAL), President Luis Herrera Campins, in his inaugural address expressed his concern regarding the problem of violence and emphasized the fact that the final program in the evenings was one of fear and terror. He wondered how those people would sleep after receiving that dose of violence.

Returning to the influence of this on children, Ignacio Burk says that the ideal would be that the child’s home would disavow and repudiate aggression, that parents would discuss one-to-one with their children what they had seen and admired. If this were to happen, TV could produce beneficial educational effects, no matter how much it reflects the violence and reprehensible acts of social reality.

But how many parents sit down with their children to discuss the programs, to teach them to interpret the programs? The bottom line is being responsible and prepared parents.

Regarding violence on television, there are two extremes. One condemns television, especially commercial television, as a sequence of brutality, rampant sex, and a mental drug factory. The other defends, with equal fervor, the visual consumption of violence and sex as a healthy and necessary purging that releases the subject from his burden of aggressiveness that he accumulates daily in life.

Four positions are derived from these theories.

The first notes that children who watch violent behavior learn it cognitively and retain it for some time. The second theory assumes that the visual consumption of violence excites people who are usually peaceful, but pacifies those who tend to be violent. The increase in aggressiveness is inversely proportional to the pressure of the repressed frustrations of the subject. The third position is held by those who think that brutality and violence, far from causing imitation, instead arouse repulsion. Finally, there is the theory that says that the constant consumption of audiovisual violence dulls sensitivity. There comes a time in which, for both adults and children, watching televised grusomeness at their leisure is productive in order for them to be fortified, prepared, and furthermore be able to confront a savage and cruel world “tranquilly and without nervousness” . And if we do not, they place an ad for us that tells us: You are not Rumildo, taking advantage of the Venezuelan complex of not wanting to be seen as stupid.

Finally, Burk reaches the conclusion that criminally aggressive individuals are not spawned by TV alone. There are two more important factors, namely: family and sociocultural environments that are profoundly damaged, and the early antisocial structuring of the personality .

In addition, children’s programming is not as “natural” as people think. “Natural” would be that children were guided by their parents in this regard, but this is impeded by a generational communication gap that has become insurmountable. Children are isolated from the world of their elders. They grow at the edge of the lives and the work of their own. They are not given the opportunity to identify with real people such as their family and relatives that they admire. To satisfy its need for models, the television offers Tarzans, unreal and fantastic characters.

This takeover by television of the child’s mind for reasons of business, perhaps for reasons of ideology, could be more serious and pernicious than its violent scenes.