How the Media, Violence, and Advertising Effects the Minds of Young Children and Adults

How the Media, Violence, and Advertising Effects the Minds of Young Children and Adults

Media, it’s everywhere you go, and plays a major role in our everyday lives. It’s the largest source of entertainment and the most powerful and influential invention in the twentieth century. The amount of violence and advertising seen in the media has posed a lot of controversy, and many studies have made clear that the media is responsible for much of the violence seen in our world we live today. Many of our television programs, films, and music lyrics depict different forms of violence, and have an impact not only on children, but adults too.

Since the birth of television, crime has skyrocketed, students now fear to live in America, and schools have turned into war zones with school shoots occurring more than often. This has become more overwhelming evidence that excessive violence on television causes more violence in not only children but adults too. Ninety-five percent of the time, society will willingly watch a show designed for them, and will intimate someone on television as reality, as to imitating a live person.

In 1950, ten percent of American homes had television, and by 1960, the number had increased to ninety percent. Today ninety-nine percent of all American homes have a television; in fact more families own a television than a phone. By the time a child has reached the age of eighteen, he or she will have witnessed on T.V. along , with an average viewing time, 200,000 acts if violence, including 40,000 of them murders. Young children ages eight to eighteen, view about fours hours of television a day, twenty –eight hours a week, which is twice as much time they spend in school, in addition to two hours on the compute...

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...oper ads and commercials. Decreasing the amount of television kids watch have led to less weight gain and also lower body mass index. Ads to children look ideal and say that they simply have to have it.

Television and advertisements in moderation can be a good educator and entertainer, too much can be detrimental though. So, as we continue to question; what can we really do to help? We need to teach kids to be savvy consumers by talking with them about products, acts, and advertisements. Ask thought provoking questions, and help them put into perspective what things are real and what are not. Recording programs without commercials have been a good technique in the past, along with stocking the rooms where televisions set are with non screen entertainment, books, age appropriate magazines, toys, puzzles, and board games, to encourage doing something different.