The Disturbing Role of Television in Accidents and Deaths Involving Children :: Term Papers Research

The Disturbing Role of Television in Accidents and Deaths Involving Children Imagine being a mother or a father standing in the kitchen doing dishes when out of nowhere a familiar scream hits your ears. The first thing you do is ask yourself â€Å"Where are my kids?† The phone rings and your next-door neighbor informs you that he/she has called 911 and you should come right away. You slam down the phone and in a panic you run down your walk across the street, arriving just as the ambulance backs into the drive. Next thing you know your 11-year-old son Billy, broken and bleeding, is being sped to the hospital. Far-fetched, as this story may seem it is happening more and more everyday. Billy got hurt because he and his friends were re-enacting a move they had seen on WWF the night before. Does television really influence good kids to do bad things? The answer is yes depending on the type of program and its content. At a young age children absorb everything they see and hear including things that adults see as minor, or non-influential. Television can do several things, create ideas in a child’s mind, pacify physical energy that could be used productively, tell children that unacceptable behavior is ok, and that humans are invincible. All of these ideas are false and can lead to destructive behavior and circumstances, and in some cases death. â€Å"The statistical correlation between childhood exposure to violence in media and aggressive behavior is about the same as that between smoking and lung cancer† (Atkinson, Michael. 59) (put a period after the parenthetical citation, and only include the author’s last name and page number in parentheses) We all know that for anyone who smokes a great deal lung cancer is almost inevitable, this causes great concern because most children spend much of their spare time in front of the television or playing video games. (make more explicit the connection between the effects of smoking and the effects of watching too much TV) Many childhood accidents related to television are in the form of copycat crimes says Michael Atkinson in his article â€Å"The movies made me do it†, â€Å"Copycat crimes have attained front-burner notoriety, and some day soon Hollywood’s liberty will be pitted against the perceived welfare of American children† (58). Many chil dren’s cartoons such as â€Å"X Men† and â€Å"PokeMon† tend to be very violent and anger oriented, (semicolon) therefore when children copycat what they see often times they end up hurting themselves or someone else, possibly even causing death.