As a child, I always looked forward to Saturday morning cartoons. My family had the most basic cable package, which consisted of fewer than twenty channels. These did not include popular kid’s channels such as Nickelodeon or Disney Channel. One morning per week cartoons appeared on my TV screen, and I would wake up early, excited and engrossed in the plotlines. As times have changed and more research has been conducted, opinions on the effects of have cartoons changed. Several medical organizations came together in 2000 to submit a joint statement to Congress expressing “viewing entertainment violence can lead to increases in aggressive attitudes, values, and behavior, particularly in children” (Wilson, 2008, p.100). Today there are correlations between aggressive cartoons and aggressive behavior in children. There have also been findings supporting educational television programs, but we are left to discern what qualifies as educational. I have chosen to review two cartoons I grew up watching; PBS’s Arthur and Cartoon Network’s Pokémon. I viewed the first two episodes of each program, and drew my conclusions from these observations. In this paper, I offer basic synopsis of each television program and assess some of their basic features such as targeted age group, promotion of pro- or anti-social behavior, as well as themes and cultural and gender aspects. I then analyze these aspects in their effect on early childhood development, whether positive or negative.
Arthur is a cartoon based on the Arthur books by Marc Brown about an 8 year old aardvark in the third grade and the lessons he learns by virtue of his family, friends, and community. According to Common Sense Media, Arthur is recommended for ages 5 and up, and portrays po...
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...okémon - TV review. (n.d.). Common Sense Media. Retrieved April 22, 2014, from http://www.commonsensemedia.org/tv-reviews/pokemon
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The controversy over whether or not violence portrayed on television actually affects children or not has been playing itself out for nearly three decades. When some of the first results came out in the 60s and 70s that made the first connections between aggressive behavior and viewing televised violence, the TV and movie industries denied that there was a connection. When studies found the same thing in the 80s, the FCC opposed any regulation (Hepburn). A writer for Direct Ma...
Human Development. Ed. Deborah Carr. Vol. 1: Childhood and Adolescence. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2009. 50-55. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 21 Nov. 2013.
"How TV Affects Your Child." Kids Health - the Web's Most Visited Site about Children's
The show “Arthur” is a cartoon that plays on PBS. The show is based on the “Arthur” adventure books. The characters are all animals. It is centered around an eight year-old aardvark named Arthur, his mother and father, his two sisters D.W. and Baby Kate, his friends and classmates Buster, Francine, The Brain (Alan), Binky. Muffy, Sue Ellen, George, Prunella, and Fern, and his third grade teacher, Mr. Ratburn.
Children have become much more interested in cartoons over many years and it has become a primary action to some lives. Typically, children begin watching cartoons on television at an early age of six months, and by the age two or three children become enthusiastic viewers. This has become a problem because too many children are watching too much television and the shows that they are watching (even if they are cartoons) have become violent and addictive. The marketing of cartoons has become overpowering in the United States and so has the subliminal messaging. The marketing is targeted toward the children to cause them to want to view the cartoons on a regular basis, but the subliminal messaging is for the adults’ to target them into enjoying the “cartoons”. This is unfortunate because children watch the cartoons on the television and they see material that is not appropriate for their age group. The Children who watch too much cartoons on television are more likely to have mental and emotional problems, along with brain and eye injuries and unexpectedly the risk of a physical problem increases.
Television programs that are targeted towards children, such as cartoons, can affect children in both positive and negative ways. I examined a variety of cartoons on both commercial and public television to observe the content of children's programming and determine the effects, both positive and negative, that programs have on children. The cartoons contain a wide variety of subject matters that can influence children in many different ways. I found that the majority of cartoons choose to use violence and inappropriate subject matter to entertain children. These images and stories can have a tremendous negative impact on children because the violence is rewarded without consequences, is glorified, and idealized. Children look up to the characters that have a negative impact by distorting their views on conflict resolution. There are, however, cartoons that contain little or no violence and often try to incorporate educational lessons that concern values and morals that are important for children to learn, thus having a positive impact.
Most American's would agree that children watch a lot of TV. It's common to see a child sitting in front of the TV on a Saturday morning with their Coco Pebbles watching their favorite superhero. This sounds harmless enough. However, many parents and teachers across the country are worried about the cartoons their children are watching. They feel that the cartoons have become too violent and are having negative long-term effects on children. It is common to see young boys pretending to shoot one another, while jumping on the couch and hiding in closets as a sort of make-believe fort. But parents say that children are learning these behaviors from cartoons and imitating them. Others however, disagree, they say that violence in cartoons does not effect children and that children need this world of fantasy in their lives. They say that children would show these same behaviors regardless of the content of the cartoons they watch.
As early as 1958 investigations were being conducted of the effects of television on children. During this time, the researchers found that most of the television content was extremely violent. In almost half of the television hours monitored, the programs main focus contained violence. The common theme that was seen throughout the programs were crime, shooting, fighting, and murder. The universal definition of violence used was, "Any overt depiction of the use of physical force, or the credible threat of such force, to intend to physically harm an animated being or group of beings." In this investigation, Wilbur Schramm concluded that under some conditions, some violent television could effect some children. For the most part, most television is neither helpful or harmful to most kids under most circumstances. As you can see this conclusion is quiet vague, and does not give a lot of crucial information for us to correct and improve. Schramm and his colleagues came up with a solution for parents to provide a warm, loving, secure family environment for their children, and they would have little to worry about.
Cartoon violence negatively affects children both mentally and physically. According to George Drinka, M.D., violent cartoons even cause sleep disturbance in young children. He states that cartoons go so far as to not just correlate, but cause sleep loss (Drinka 1). In addition, “poor sleep for children is associated with other ill effects like behavioral and emotional problems” (Drinka 2). The graphic violence in cartoons has also been proven to cause aggression. According to “Professor L Rowell Huesmann, a senior research professor at the Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, USA,” an increase in exposure to violence can increase aggressive behavior. He, and several others, have all conducted numerous studies on the matter and noticed increased aggression in childr...
How TV Affects your Child? Kids Health. October 2011. Web. The Web.
There’s an ancient chinese proverb that states “A child’s life is like a piece of paper on which everyone who passes by leaves an impression” (Great-Quotes.com.) People blindly believe that children are easily influenced by violent cartoons on television. From generation to generation parents are always warned not to allow their kids to watch too much violent cartoons. What kids watch- and not just how much- matters when it comes to television viewing (Rochman.) But just how true is that? Research on the negative influences of cartoons on children is inconclusive and complex.
Furthermore, television violence causes aggressive behavior in children. Many people believe that children who watch violent television programs exhibit more aggressive behavior than that exhibited by children who do not (Kinnear 23). According to the results of many studies and reports, violence on television can lead to aggressive behavior in children (Langone 50). Also, when television was introduced into a community of children for the first time, researchers observed a rise in the level of physical and verbal aggression among these children (Langone 51). The more television violence viewed by a child, the more aggressive the child is (“Children” 1).
Television violence causes destructive behavior in children, however; television can be a powerful influence to young viewers in our society. Unfortunately, much of today's television programming are very violent. Many researchers like scientists, pediatricians, and child researchers in many countries have studied to find out what it is about television violence that makes it such a big affect on the way kids act and behave. Sometimes, children think that is a normal thing in our real life, by watching only a single violent program, which can increase aggressiveness on children and become violent, aggressive, and vicious.
First, children who normally watch TV are more likely to have delayed brain development. For example, by constantly watching TV, children will be lack of natural skill exploring such as language development on learning and attention. According to Mary L. Courage, who is a researcher professor at Memorial University of Newfoundland, “Exposure to the unnaturally fast pace of sound and image change in video material during this sensitive period might alter synaptic connections in the neural networks underlying attention and shorten the infant’s attention span” (73). Basically, she is saying that many children started at...