WHAT ARE THE EFFECTS OF TELEVISION ON CHILDREN?

ABSTRACT

For this paper, I wanted to research the effects of television. I decided to go for this topic because for one, I found it really interesting, and I really wanted to know how deeply children could be affected. Since there are numerous amounts of effects of television onto children, I decided to focus on three broad aspects. These aspects were; how it affects their cognitive development and their concentration, how it affects their behavior, and how it affects their health. Focusing on these three I was able to hone in on my main point, that too much television for a child is harmful to say the least. I decided to make a survey to gather data on if people agreed with my opinion, and I really wanted another perspective. I gave out my surveys to people next to the playground at McDonalds, at any random restaurant, and also at the park. I really wanted an opinion from people who had some type of relationship to a child.

INTRODUCTION

My topic of interest will be on television and how it affects children. So, how does television affect children? For my project I focused on how television affects a child’s health, behavior, and their cognitive development.

Now to pursue this topic my main ideas are to find a collection of about eight articles and such that relate to my topic and with relatable information to help me answer my overall question. I plan to collect statistics from professionals that actually study the changes and effects on children caused by television. I will also be creating a survey to get a more widespread viewpoint onto my topic, because I am only one person, and so I will probably miss seeing it from another perspective. For this survey I will hone in on those who have some type of relationship with a child, so they will be more interested to care and answer the survey. Following this survey I will be able to put together a more widespread opinion in my presentation.

On my topic, I plan to share my findings in the form of a presentation where I will skim through a cluster of statistics, data, and information on my topic. I will also have a handout to give to students and my professor so they will not feel lost and confused during my five-minute oral presentation. I hope to conclude with getting an opinion of the surveyors, and how they feel about this topic.

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

My research topic is about the effects television has on young children. Among my articles, I collected those that talked about media, parent, children and television. I also picked a couple that stood out to me as surprising information, and these journals and articles will give me a good idea of where to go with this project on my topic.

1.) This article is more of know-how on using advertising to young children. It gives a brief history on how infants had for a very long time been given no attention in terms of advertising. By 1977, infants were the only age group that received little to no attention. Beginning of that attention began around the time of Walt Disney. Now days, infants have become an industry. Now there is a target audience of just infants and babies. There are certain tricks of the trade such as, infants absolutely love colorful thing, often times noisy things too. This article displayed how the minds of advertising work when it came to the child.

2.) This article tackles the debacle of what the effects of infants using media entails. Historically infants were not inclined to watch television until around the year 1977 because there were no shows that targeted to them, thus they didn’t have a flicker of an interest. However now, nearly every infant and child has watched television in their time and nearly all of what’s being showed on television, is being watched by them. When a child watches too much television, it begins to affect their language, their attitudes, and even their academics. One cannot shield every inappropriate thing on television, so the kids learn corrupt things even on channels meant for them. Children are very impressionable beings, and they see and do what they see around them. If they see violence than they are more likely to make violence.

3.) This article studies the dynamic treatment effect analysis of television effects on child cognitive development. Children from the US spend the most amount of time in from of their television more that any other nation. This test is trying to find out if the age in which they start this obsession with TV is significant to what age it is that they do it in, and if it affects any cognitive development. To test their cognitive development, researchers tested them on math, reading scores. These were just subjects to get the brain running again. The result varied but showed the decline in math and reading scores was higher when the TV watching began very early. This article gave me more ammunition in my opinion of what the effect of TV does to children.

4.) This paper is aimed at studying the attitudinal reactions of the sixty-five African children. From the research we can deduct that the children seem to enjoy the advertising as long as it includes cartoons, and other forms of entertainment. The children seemed to enjoy when the native tongue was mixed into the ads. These children live in a very different environment where they may not have as much as, say and American child however alike all the children are, they found the news like materials boring and enjoyed watch the food. The article gave me a better background information on my topic.

5.) This article studies the mother’s opinion of what the negative television food ads are doing to their children’s food choices. For a while now, infants have become target audiences for many ads including food. It is shown that most mothers believe that the children of others are the ones receiving the negative impact from the television food ads, but yet not their own children. This articles looks at the mother’s opinion on whether their children are being engulfs by television advertising, particularly in the discussion of food. Many advertisements aiming to the child in the house are honing in on grabbing that child’s attention. So when a young child hears about all the chocolate cereal that is out of this world, he/she are to want it badly. Article also discusses how though media, namely television, influence kids, especially those who watch it profusely, there is also the family. Families alone are huge influences on kids, and the family is where they will for example learn from or mimic in life. This article showed how even though television is a greater influence, there are also other influences.

6.) Mr. Latif delves into the important effects that TV can have on young children. He spread out a survey of sorts in Pakistan and with many experiments and such he was able to concur that just as in America, when the absorption of so much television occurs, there is also an unhealthy amount of harmful food being consumed. He concurred that when the television put out ads of all of these harmful foods, it inadvertently goes to the children and they will of course want to eat it. This article really helped show that though this is huge in America; it can be just the same in other countries.

7.) In this article we see the meeting place between watching televisions, the food intake, and one’s BMI. This topic has not been broached on a deeper level, but it is commonly known, the couch potato who always watches television, and eats the junk food. For over two years researchers observed families from Australia and kept tabs on their food intake, and how much television they watched. At the end of this, researchers were able to determine that inconsequently if you watch too much television, then you were highly likely to gain the weight and vise-versa. It is best to make stop to it now. This articles game me evidence of just how high the health risks are for children who watch too much television.

8.) Watching television now is a consistent daily routine with children. Starting from a young age, children are learning how the television works at the same time that they are learning their shapes and colors. One considered positive effect from television is the tie it brings home and a common like within the family. In other places around the world, America is seen as lax on types of behavior. Children so young who watch TV more than two hours a day have been exposed to negative effects. There are both positive and negative aspects of children watching television. This gives details to both sides of the argument.

            After reading all of these data, and statistics, and point of views from all over the world, I believe I have now an idea of where to take my ideas. There was one article in particular that spoke of the cognitive effects of television at a young and impressionable age, so that really helped. I will gather my data and see where it leads me.

METHODS

When I knew that I had to make a survey, I really tried to focus it to the topic of children and of television. When beginning a survey there is of course the demographic questions, such as their race/ethnic group, if they are male or female, and lastly of course their age. I felt that it was important to include the surveyors about their own childhoods so as to involve them. I felt it important to gather what the surveyors knew, and what they didn’t know. When I set about gathering my surveyors, I began with only a diverse group of parents from single parents to married, but half way through I saw that I would always get the parent perspective and decided to go to a few older single people and get their opinions, and even a set of teenagers. I wanted to be able to see through both sides of the looking glass. I found that the parents used television to distract their kids for a couple of minutes to get work done, and in contrast the single folks said that they would spend every minute with their child and it seemed had a more of a idealistic point of view and hadn’t been exposed to the hard scope of parenthood. I would love to have delved further into that but alas my focus was on the kids. I gave my survey out to a divers group of people from Asian, African-Americans, and Latin Americans all from varying ages from 19-49.

FINDINGS & DISCUSSIONS

 DISCUSSIONS

I do believe the most of the surveyors successfully implemented their point of views to me when doing this survey. Other than the survey I had chances to talk with them and I was able to paint a picture of what their opinion was on television and how much of it children watch. The older, more educated adults felt that their children should not watch TV over a certain amount of hours. The less educated parents were just as strict in their opinions on the subject because as seen in my finding, all of their parents knew that too much television was not in their best interests. No matter what they did, they were urged to move away from the television. After I surveyed the parents I went on to the single, non-parent adults that did agree that too much TV was not good for children but did not see any harm from watching TV. One quoted from reading the survey, “yeah, my 9 year old sister knows all about The Jersey Shore, and I haven’t got a clue how she was able to watch that”. From the two younger adults that I surveyed, they seemed very distant from the topic, however surprisingly one had a sister who was a teen mom, and was more deeply connected to the world of parenting, or in his case being an uncle. One particular part that I highlight is that one parent seemed to consider educational television as not television, and put it into its own category. I was very surprised at the way she explained it, and seemed confused herself. She seemed to go back and forth.

      When I took in the survey results, and finished reading the articles and journals, I found connections such as that in one journal it was stated that America was in fact number one, when it came to the amount of television that our children watched. The article was able to give further insight, that America was not the only one country with this type of problem of kids watching too much television and resulting in weight gain. In the article it stated that those living in Pakistan were also going through the same thing, and that America was not alone in the issue, and it was international. Most surveyors answered that America was too lax with television watch, but they did not know how international it was.

      Now that I have finished this survey and come to a conclusion, there were many changes I would have made. When it came to the survey, I would have included more questions that asked what the surveyor already knew, so that I could see where they were at and could enlighten them further with all this data and information. Another change that I would made, was when I took the survey I should have picked people who had one common factor so that I could better compare their results. As of now I have surveys from 10 random adults, but if these people had one common factor it would have led to a good comparison. In terms of my sources, I wish I could have picked an array of people instead of all being researchers. I found 8 sources that all had a connection to children/infants and media, particularly television.

CONCLUSION

 After my research and surveys and countless hours of thinking, I concluded that many people did agree that a child watching too much television was harmful in some way or another, but some also explained to me that if they didn’t get their children to watch TV or a movie, they would never be able to get any work done. I concluded that many parents made exception, such as the mother who spoke of education TV as something different from the other side of television. I concluded that I was able to get the information across to my surveyors about these effects caused by television such as the behavior aspects, the health aspects, and the development of the brain., and that majority to all agree that television causes more harm than good to young kids, and that you should just let them play.

REFERNCES

1. Bargh D, McAlister A, Cornwell T, Morrison M. PATHS TO PERSUASION WHEN ADVERTISING TO YOUNG CHILDREN. American Academy Of Advertising Conference Proceedings [serial online]. March 2012;:66-68. Available from: Business Source Complete, Ipswich, MA. Accessed May 2, 2013.
2. Christakis D. The effects of infant media usage: what do we know and what should we learn?. Acta Paediatrica [serial online]. January 2009;98(1):8-16. Available from: Academic Search Complete, Ipswich, MA. Accessed May 2, 2013.
3. Fali, Huang, and Lee Myoung-Jae. “Dynamic Treatment Effect Analysis Of TV Effects On Child Cognitive Development.” Journal Of Applied Econometrics 25.3 (2010): 392-419. Business Source Complete. Web. 2 May 2013.
4. Gbadamosi A, Hinson R, Tukamushaba E, Ingunjiri I. Children’s attitudinal reactions to TV advertisements. International Journal Of Market Research [serial online]. July 2012;54(4):543-566. Available from: Business Source Complete, Ipswich, MA. Accessed May 2, 2013.
5. Jay (Hyunjae), Yu. “Research Report: Mothers’ Perceptions Of The Negative Impact On TV Food Ads On Children’S Food Choices.” Appetite 59.The 36th annual meeting of the British Feeding and Drinking Group, March 29th and 30th 2012, Brighton, UK (n.d.): 372-376. ScienceDirect. Web. 2 May 2013.
6. Latif, Abdul, and Zain-Ul-Abideen. “Effects Of Television Advertising On Children: A Pakistani Perspective.” European Journal Of Economics, Finance & Administrative Sciences 30 (2011): 38-49. Business Source Complete. Web. 2 May 2013.
7. Matthew F, Helen S, Louise L. H, Christine H. Research report: The associations between TV viewing, food intake, and BMI. A prospective analysis of data from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children. Appetite [serial online]. n.d.;59:945-948. Available from: ScienceDirect, Ipswich, MA. Accessed May 2, 2013.
8. PEDÜK, Şenay BULUT. “A Study On Characteristiscs Of Parents’ Tv Viewing And     Children’s Opinions On The Cartoons They Watched.” International Journal Of Business & Social Science 3.1 (2012): 224-233. Business Source Complete. Web. 2 May 2013.