Television (TV) has its good side. It is entertaining and educative, and can open up new worlds for kids, giving them a chance to travel the globe, learn about different cultures, and gain exposure to ideas they may never encounter in their own community. Programs with positive role models can influence the audience to improvise their behavior to the better.
A great deal exists among children and television, because there have been thousands of studies on the subject. Researchers have studied how TV affects kids\’ sleep, weight, grades, behavior, and more. It’s worth looking at what the research says when deciding how to manage television in your family.
However, the reverse can also be true: Kids are likely to learn things from TV that parents don’t want them to learn. TV can affect kids’ health and family life. The growth in the pattern of TV set owner ship and the level of exposure to the medium suggest that more families are watching television for longer periods of time but not necessarily together.
Spending time watching TV can take time away from healthy activities like active play outside with friends, eating dinner together as a family, or reading. TV time also takes away from participating in sports, music, art or other activities that require practice to become skillful. TV viewing starts even much earlier than other forms of media— often beginning before the kids start to speak.
In recent years, TV, video and DVD programs geared to babies and toddlers have come on the market—and now even lots of television channels especially for kids. We don’t know yet what effect TV-viewing by kids may have on their development. We do know that time spent watching TV replaces time spent interacting with caregivers and other co-kids nearby. Social interaction is vital to a baby’s healthy development.
TV viewing is probably replacing activities in your child’ s life that you would rather have them do (things like playing with friends, being physically active, getting fresh air, reading, playing imaginatively, doing homework, doing chores).
Kids, who spend more time watching TV either with or without parent and sibling’s presence, spend less time interacting with family members. Excessive TV viewing can contribute to poor grades; sleep disorders, behavioral impacts and so on…
Most children’s programming does not teach moral values and constructivism; rather the shows are filled with stereotypes, violent solutions to problems, and mean behavior. In most cases, Advertisers make a good business by corrupting kid’s minds.
Televisions and computers caused a consistent pattern of inspiration that resulted in inadequate maturity of the child’s brain. Pokemon might keep a toddler happy and less destructive but all those hours of sitting in front of the screen instead of running around was harmful to a kid’s health. Violence is more in today’s media content.
Children and youth see, on average, about 2,000 beer and wine ads on TV each year, Kids see favorite characters smoking, drinking, and involved in sexual situations and other risky behaviors in the shows and movies they watch on TV.
Television is a best medium of exposure for today’s kids. But handling those fresh minds rightfully and developing them is a major responsibility for all the content producers of media.
(this article is pubished in Kovai Images, a Coimbatore based weekly edition)
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