Community Magazine August 2006

 ”  28 Community Magazine journal Pediatrics, showed overwhelming evidence that kids who spent a lot of time in front of the television were far more likely to get involved in drinking, drugs, violence, smoking, promiscuous behavior, and delinquency than teens who focused on sports and physical activity. Last July, the Journal of Adolescent Health , ran an article called, “Saturated in beer: Awareness of beer advertising in late childhood and adolescence” that analyzed how kids are affected by beer commercials. Elementary school students could easily name brands of several beers, and what their television advertise- ments looked like. Another recent study conducted by the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth at Georgetown University found that the top 15 teen-oriented programs in 2003 had alcohol ads. Despite age restrictions on alcohol consumption, 80% of youth have tried alcohol by the end of high school, and 50% are current drinkers. Government agencies, public health advocates, and alco- hol researchers believe that exposure to alcohol advertisements is contributing to this problem. So can parents of the Tivo generation avoid these toxic messages by simply fast-forwarding commercials? Studies say: no way. The messages bombarding kids from the shows themselves are just as dangerous – if not more so. For example, although cigarette ads have been banned from television for many years, kids and teens can still see plenty of people smoking on programs and movies airing on TV. This kind of “product placement” may be even more effective than commercials at influencing behavior and it makes these activities seem acceptable. In fact, kids who watch five or more hours of TV per day are far more likely to begin smoking cigarettes than those who watch less than two hours a day. Kill the Coyote… Again and Again TV executives point out that the influence of TV appears to work both ways. In a meta-analysis of 34 studies published in Media Psychology, researchers found that the positive effect of self-selected exposure to prosocial content (shows portraying positive social interaction), such as altruism, was as strong as the negative effect of self-selected exposure to violent content. The question is, how many shows display prosocial behavior and which shows are kids choosing to watch? Violence sells. Networks continue to push the envelope creating shows with more frequent and fiercer scenes, because that is what produces the highest ratings. A child can be expected to see over 16,000 TV murders and over 185,000 other violent acts by age 18, according to the American Psychiatric Association. In a study in the journal Pediatrics called, “Television Viewing and Violence in Children: the Pediatrician as Agent for Change” (Vol. 94, 1994) researchers noted that, “Violence on television is frequent… and rewarded. It is practiced as often by the heroes as by the villains.” As such, children learn and imitate behaviors because violence is attrac- tive on television. The studies, done over the course of three decades, clearly establish that people who watch more television violence as children are more likely to be criminally violent as adults. Teenagers and young adults who watch even as little as an hour of television a day are more likely to get into fights, commit assaults or engage in other types of violence later in life, according to a study published in the journal, Science in April 2002. In April of this year, Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine reported studies from Harvard that found that TV watching directly boosts aggression in kids. The study also found that that the more TV kids watched, the less time they spent with their friends. This relation- ship was especially strong in the case of violent TV. Since violent TV is linked with aggressive behavior in children, it makes it harder for these children to get along with other children, the study says. Researchers also posited that children generated permissive attitudes towards drugs, with increased exposure to television pro- gramming that featured drugs. These findings appear to play out in our own community schools, as a local educator concurs that these findings are consistent with her own experiences. “The more they see, the more they want to act it out,” says this teacher in the Flatbush community, who offered her comments on condition of anonymity because she feared paren- tal backlash if she publicized her true feelings about her students’ television habits. “It is definitely evident in the kids who watch television. They start acting out the characters they see on televi- sion and assume the identity of the make-believe characters.” She cites in particular the shows where fighting is portrayed often and points to cases of students who come to class and try doing karate- like moves on other students. Over time, studies say, the young viewer becomes inured to the images they see on TV – or even, at times, believing them to be true. Impressionable youngsters exposed to high doses of televi- sion fantasy may not be merely pretending to be someone they’re not as some type of game, but rather they may have lost grasp of reality. “At a young age they don’t know what’s real,” she says. “I tell them that it works fine on TV, but it doesn’t work fine when you act it out.” One local parent reported that after caving in to her nine-year-old son’s wishes to buy him a Batman belt buckle, she found out the reason he wanted it: because a TV show taught him that it would deflect lightning. The Birds and the Bees… in Explicit Human Terms According to the latest bian- nual study by the Kaiser Family Foundation, 70% of all shows include some "inappropriate" con- tent and these shows average 5.0 such scenes per hour. Compared to results of the 1998 study, the aggregate number of such scenes nearly doubled from 1,930 to 3,780. Among TV show genres, sit- coms had the highest percentage (87%) of such content. About half The family oriented nature of this publication prevents the full extent of pro- miscuity on television from being represented here. Therefore, readers should not get the impression that the limited and muted account described here, illustrates the true extent with which this type of behavior is portrayed on television.