Bad Kids, TV To blame?
 

We've seen the decline of manners, politeness, and respect over the years. Elders have always been saying that the youth have no respect. Could it be something as simple as the examples we see on TV? We emulate the clothes they wear and cars they drive, one liners and catchphrases, why not their attitudes?

Absolutely we emulate what we see on tv, and why should kids be any different? They see behavior held up as the norm on television, but they will also see what other kids are doing and saying in real life. Whatever the model they're picking things up from, they're going to push the boundaries, see what they can get away with. And parents will get precisely the behavior they tolerate. It was ever thus, long before television.

I'd say that there is something to this. I've long believed that sitcoms also affect how people treat each other in relationships. My wife and I were both quite limited in what TV we were allowed to watch growing up, and had noticed a difference in how we treat each other vs what we saw among our college friends.

I also remember, back in Junior High, when all the "cool kids" had all these catch phrases. I wondered how they knew about them. Then I discovered they were repeating lines from television shows, and I thought that was pathetic. I've never been popular.

Yes. The comfortable delusion that we are not greatly influenced by media is rampant. I don't think we'll ever really face the realities of all this in any significant way...

OhI think you're the bees knees... :D

I'm not so sure that it's television that causes the problem but rather the use of television as the babysitter and parents not taking an active role in the upbringing of their children. How many people have the telly on while having dinner, rather than communiticating with their children and taking an interest in their children's lives.

You took the words right out of my mouth. Parents need to be actively involved in monitoring what their children watch and teaching them how to behave properly.

They do need to be actively involved. One of the parents in this article is doing such a thing and has noticed a decrease in bad behavior and is correlating the decrease in "bad" programming to better behavior.

Well at least we know someone was a dork in high school. :p

High school was more than 20 years ago... damned right I was a dork... :) it just took me that long to realize it... Heck, I'm still a dork :) It's part of my charm :)

That's really sad that they can't correlate increated attention to their children with an increase in good behavior... 2 x 4 to the head as a wake up call.

When my brother was about 7 he watched an episode of The Simpsons. That evening when my mom asked him to do something he responded with, "Eat my crusty shorts." He wasn't allowed to watch The Simpsons again until he was 15. I think some children are easily influenced by what they see on T.V. which is why it's important for parents to monitor what's being viewed according to their child's maturity level.

I agree with the sentiment that active parenting has more to do with behavior.

But I will say that TV definitely has something to do with the decreased attention spans of children. With a commerical every twelve minutes, the brain can't focus on long term tasks.

And every problem can be resolved in a half-hour time period. If not, might as well break up with your SO.

Saw a t-shirt on a highschool kid today that said TV makes you smarter. I couldn't decide if it was serious or not. Either way I felt like smacking him. I find this works out best: everything in moderation - even moderation.

It's mindnumbing to me that parents who can't control their kids have to look for something to blame other than themselves. This has become the age of passing the buck. Far too many parents who are no better than children themselves with their self-centered lives and blame game ethics. But once again, It's so much easier to blame than to take responsibility for their own actions.

"Blame Canada!"

i believe television can have an effect on kids, but the parents can overturn those negative tendencies they pick up if they will spend time to teach their children appropriate behaviors. too many times, parents (which i am not one) plop their kids in front of the television so that they don't have to entertain them. parents must take responsibility for what they chose to bring into this world.

This article brings to mind my little cousin who is 5 years old, who sits on the couch in front of his TV for the majority of the time after he's come home from school, watching cartoons. I can wholeheartedly understand where this article is coming from because I see the exact same problem present with my cousin and it breaks my heart to see him grow up like this, and yet I can't do too much since his father believes that he knows how to parent his child (but that's a different story).

Now my cousin has major behavioural problems, he is actually becoming very short tempered because he's allowed to watch the idiot box for way too long.

Now despite all of that, I really don't have anything to contribute to this thread because I completely agree with the idea that parents should be moderating what their children watch on TV and just getting more involved in their lives in general.

p.s. when I say major behavioural problems, it's because I have ridiculously high expectations of children that are blood related to me, don't ask me I picked it up from my dad.

Growing up I was allowed to choose what I wanted to watch on television. Of course my parents made it clear what was appropriate for me and what was not. We were allowed to watch the Simpsons, for example, but because of our parents' influence we didn't enjoy watching it until we were of an appropriate age to do so. I hope to raise my own children in such a manner that lets them know they can watch it if they want--but emulating attitudes and behavior found on television is not to be tolerated (my parents made this clear as well) and if they feel uncomfortable watching it they should turn it off--kids should never feel they have to watch something because their peers do (my mom always gave me the out--I could always blame it on her, even though she let me do what I wanted).

I think parental guidance is more important than moderation of television. Children are going to be exposed to sex and violence regardless; it's up to the parents to put those things in context and let children know that television shows are FICTION.

didn't matter what i watched growing up (unless it was porn), my dad's leather belt set the standard--not the television. first rated "R" movies for me were Terminator 2 and Lethal Weapon 3--when I was in 4th grade. watched 'em without the folks in the basement and my mom rented them for me. to this day, my dad gets complimented on the behavior and success of his children, and my mother does as well. while I do believe environmental inputs do affect our behavior, if certain concrete limits are established in such a way that they do not fade, inputs don't mean squat. There's a day I'll be larger than my father, but I'll never physically challenge him with the intent to actually have one of us come to harm (we still wrestle and bs around as it is). It's because that belt is something i'll always remember.

i watched tv as a kid, so did my friends and I think we'll survive - tv is a wonderful medium for communicating ideas and connecting cultures, bad parenting should have no excuse.
ART is right about people underestimating the effect the media has on us, it forms the world around us, many of our values are formed through the media it creates a framework in which we can interact. What tv cannot do is change people if your kid shows you no respect by quoting tv quips take away the tv and your stil left with a kid who shows you no respect but will find other ways to express this.
Why not try watching the tv with the kids

I knew all these kids, see. They were cute and polite and helped out their parents. All of a sudden, as if overnight, they turned into rude, emotional punks.

TV is to blame for puberty!

I personally banned 'attitude' shows. My pet hate here in Australia is Home & Away, and we also get the sassy teenage shows on cable. My daughter and I have had many a conversation about attitude and many of the 'attitude' shows. Where I fall over is all of her friends have this sassy attitude. Not that I've failed, she seems to have two personalities, one for home and one for her friends and you can see the stress when both her friends and I are in earshot. She doesn't know what to do or say!

It's a tough call though, her friends are her peers and this will be her world when she gets older. If I stiffle it too much then she won't fit in or cope. I just try to temper a bit of regard throughout our banter, what else can I do?

Edit: What frustrates me most, is the fact that there are many parents that accept this behaviour, I'm banging my head against a brick wall because what the majority of you are saying is correct - parents are no longer parents and it really frustrates me because I am doing more than my best to try and fight this, how can one person win???

Actually, I'd say that you did well. It sounds like she understands that there different circumstances where different behaviors are appropriate.

Good question Seeker, and not one easily addressed - especially by the "parental responsibility" shibboleth.

I find it quite unconvincing that a parental unit is seen as somehow having the ability to negate the influence of sophisticated hundreds-of-millions-of-dollar media blitzes, the amassed effects of a total-surround-environment of media manipulation, the assembled manifold of social, cultural, and peer pressure. It sounds good, I suppose, to recite the parental-responsibility slogans but I cannot envision a parent or parents with the necessary superhuman power to effectively repel these influences.

This is not uncommon, every teenage kid has parent behaviour and friend behaviour, in fact I'm nearly thirty and I still act differently around my parents than I do round my friends

I'd say that is exactly what should happen. It's kinda fun watching my daughter do it. She looks like her head's gonna explode. :D

I think that you're doing exactly what you should be doing. :thumbsup:

You seem to suggest that the media is not just an influence but a controlling factor to which we are helples against, all media feeds us is information - it's communication, it can a imbue a can of coke with a system of values by suggestion and placement but if you don't like coke you won't drink it, we have an amazing capacity to filter out information and more importantly to judge it's worth

Exactly Art, check my edit! :lol:

Thanks everyone :), lets start a mass media run on parenting... like the same sort of thing Jamie is doing with school lunches. Parenting is a job, it takes a lot of hard work and dedication.

d*d, who teaches people how to filter out these influenses?

I know that there are other threads available for discussing media influence, but I'll just say that I disagree with your characterization of the media as this all encompassing force that is more powerful than other social influences. I'm familiar with the media influence literature, and I just don't buy it. It certainly has effects (effects demonstrated in research on the topic), but I don't think it requires "superhuman power" for parents to influence their children above and beyond the media.

I also wouldn't characterize statements about parental responsibility as just "slogans". Parents exert a great deal of social influence over their children. It's evident in the article and has been demonstrated empirically elswhere.

Nobody it's called selective perception we do it without even noticing, if you and I were to walk down the same street at the same time and then describe what we saw we would both give different accounts, this is why when you buy a new car you suddenly notice how many other people have the same one, you just didn't notice them before

Obviously media have an influence on us at all ages. I'm closing in on 30 and I was devastated by a tv cop show a couple of nights ago.

Children aren't little adults with less knowledge; their minds work on some fundamentally different levels than do those of teens or adults. They're less able to make distinctions between fiction and reality, especially in early childhood and in the teen years.

Seeing the disrespect that tv children show their parents and elders may plant the seed that such behavior is appropriate. If they haven't been given clear, consistent guidelines, the only way they have of knowing what is and is not acceptable is to test their new knowledge, hence, what is seen as deliberate misbehavior may be little more than the child exploring boundaries. This doesn't excuse the behavior; parants need to react to such exploration by setting those boundries firmly and consistently.

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I've seen this influence first hand. I had a student last year, a preteen boy, who would come to class and start making racist remarks about blacks, using racial epithets, at one point during a discussion shouting "white power" while thrusting a fist in the air, which some of the other boys in class thought was "cool". Repeated detentions, calls home, and a Saturday school had no effect.

The boy's excuse was that he wasn't being racist, he was just repeating a comedy routine from a tv show in which a blind black man, thinking he was white, said these things, which apparently makes it ok for a white kid to say them in school.

It wasn't until we had a conference, during which the boy continued to defend his behavior, saying it wasn't he who was saying these things, it was the guy on the tv show, and he was just repeating them* because they were funny. Mom really didn't believe that he was standing up in class and shouting "white power" and discussing the merits of white supremecist music until he started defending those things in front of her, using the "it's not me, it's the tv show" thing as an excuse. A ban on the show was the ultimate result, resulting in greatly improved, though not completely extinquished (his friends would record the show for him so he could sneak off and watch it).

*This is one of those semantic games students play in which they make a meaningless distinction to defend inappropriate behavior. The basic form is, "It's not A, it's A subcategory B" ie, it's not a hat, it's a beanie, or I'm not saying racist things, I'm repeating them. Most students come to understand quickly that hairsplitting doesn't cut it in my classes.

Kids have been disobedient since the beginning of time. The only difference now is parents cant beat their children into submission without them being taken away by the state.

I agree with that 100%. What people often tend to recite is that t.v., movies, books, cartoons etc,...affect all kids equally and that all kids are predisposed to the same mindnumbing multimedia derivatives which somewhat shape their attitude or mindset. I for one don't agree with that.

What people (adults) don't like to admit too is that kids, some as young as 7 or 8 depending on there maturity level, are individuals who are forming their thinking and opinion patterns. One kid may mimic an attitude for their reasons while another kid may think that attitude is stupid and childish. These difference discount the swath of stereotypical assumptions that a greater force, that being multimedia is taking over and controlling the minds of kids to the point of no return equally.

Of course multimedia affects kids as it does adults. Some people, however young or old have the ability to see and understand it for what it is and use it for their benefit or even ignore it rather than others who seemingly are shaped and molded by it. Everyone is individual with individual thoughts. Some people think for themselves while others need someone to tell them how and what to think. Horses for courses.

Amen to these sentiments. The media are not all powerful. Parents have influence over their children before media are even recognized by children. This isn't to say the media have no effect, just that some make the media out to be larger boogiemen than they are. The parent who loses respect with their preteen due to a television show never had great respect from their child in the first place, I would wager. And this is all too often what we see in society currently.

Yes I always appreciate optimism.
In this area however I think we tend to flatter ourselves.

Some situations are hard to accept.

Interesting discussion.

I wouldn't say that TV is soley to blame for bad kids, but it sure as hell isn't an environment conducive to the well-being of a child. Cartoons like Ed, Edd and Eddy, RugRats - all that shit on the Cartoon Channel - are to a child's intellectual development what McDonalds is to their nutritional development. Its a nonstop barrage of insults, screaming, teasing, flicking boogers and laughing, cliques portraying the 'cool' kids (heros) vs the 'nerds' (losers), mom and dad as 'fairly odd parents' who are off in LaLa Land somewhere to be mocked or ignored. Even the way the cartoons are drawn is bizarre. In Ed, Edd and Eddy, the lines of the figures are in constant motion, shifting, twitching and shaking, like they're on a caffeine or coke fix. Eyes buggin out and crosseyed.

It is pure anarchy, marketed to 5 year old human beings. One has to wonder what the point of it all is.

http://www.videogameconnection.com/i...reakersbox.jpg

d*d, I agree with this. I am taking this one step further, I'm looking at it in the light that our mindset will effect what we perceive. It's not noticable until it touches our life in some way. Is television creating childrens (and societies) mindset?

sapiens & OFKU0, I can agree with your arguements however when you couple the media influences with the fact that parents generally dont invest the time or interest to counter these media influences, it is an issue that has snowballed and from where I stand, I feel like I need to be super-human to make any difference or at least temper it in my own home.

Coppertop, yes I'd agree with the bolded above. I can't help but feel sometimes that the media are clever enough to play on all of this. If it is intentional or not is another thing, but I can't help but wonder how far this can diminish before people wake up and at least recognise these very issues.

You should check this article out.

Material like this bothers me. It seems as though marketing wizards are gunnin' to pervert social functions for capatalistic purposes.

To quote Bill Hicks, "If you're in marketing or advertising, kill yourself."

Media of all forms cause all different kinds of reactions to children.

The important factor, which seems to be ignored, is that the parents are STILL just plopping Jr. down in front of the TV and going about their daily lives. They are obviously not taking part in their children's TV watching experiences, which is very sad, and is PROVEN when they have to specifically go and monitor what they're watching.

If you don't already know what your kids are watching on TV, then YOU are already the problem, not the TV. People need to be more mindful of their children's habits in general, not just TV viewing.

I don't understand how parents can drop their kids in front of the TV for hours on end and suddenly wonder HOW the TV could POSSIBLY have had so much influence on them. These parents, like many, are complete idiots.

TV and advertising in general when it started out was seen as something 'good and wholesome', along with the attitudes of the time. It's been a subtle transformation over the period since it's birth and unless you've been shown or come to this realisation yourself, why question it?

I would submit that it is IMPOSSIBLE to monitor your kid's cultural intake 24/7/365 x oh, say, 16 years or so. Further, how does one quantify exactly how long it takes for a kid to form a permanent impression? 30 seconds? 5 minutes? 8.5 minutes? 37.25 minutes? We're talking about young children with blank slates for minds - children who at this stage of life simply are not psychologically sophisticated enough to distinguish between fantasy and reality.

What reinforces these notions for me is witnessing the behavior of children after they've watched something constructive and positive. They will surprise you with an intelligent question seemingly beyond their years, or draw a picture filled with extreme detail, or have a remarkably enlightened conversation with one of their peers.

Someone here once made the metaphor along the lines of 'swimming in a cultural pool', or otherwise total and complete psychological immersion. The more I think about it the more I agree. It seems illogical for one to be able to make decisions in a vacuum.

There definitely needs to be a major re-think on the part of industries responsible for creating the intellectual/cultural landscape inhabited by the foundation of any society: Children.

Television sets have no moral guidelines in the way they operate, watching it is not compulsary. Parents do not have to sit idly by and watch in horror as their children watch whatever they choose, BE parents - if you think a show is warping your kids fragile little mind stop them from watching it. Advertising is evil?? no, people are stupid - you don't like coke, don't buy it, all marketing and advertising can ever do is to associate values to their product- they cannot manipulate you in the ways suggested in this thread they cannot MAKE you do something, people in marketing are normal everyday people not evil corporate tools hell bent on world destruction

Bad TV = Bad children? GTF outta here. Television doesn't make the child bad, acceptance of bad behavior does. I grew up watching tv in my spare time, and still do. I used to do homework while my father watched his soaps. Perhaps a child reacts bad because of a show he watched - it's up to the parent to set him (or her) straight. Our society is becoming too reliant on others setting the standards for our children, and then getting pissed off for setting them. Bottom line - if you think tv is too much for your kids, shut it off. But even better, get more involved in wtf your kids are doing.

Bolding mine

This is the same point the article is trying to make. Parents are seeing children misbehaving as a result of imitating what they see on tv, and they have to intervene to correct the behavior. One of the interventions is restricting their viewing habits.

It is easy beyond belief to tell someone else what to do. These parental responsibility statements would be more sensible and convincing if there were some acknowledgement of the high degree of difficulty involved in parenting - especially as it concerns remapping the social and cultural conditioning that affect children, the actual life pressure and predicament of parenting in an isolated home, the situation that no one is adequately prepared for the task of parenting, and the fact that media literacy is not a required subject in our educational systems.

gilda,

thank you for making that connection.

When I first posted this article, the headline I was going to use was Parents Monitor Kids TV Habits, See Difference. I even was going to put in a paragraph stating that people who put in the knee jerk reaction of "Parents should be more involved with their kids," did not read nor comprehend the article.

I decided to see just how many people were going to just respond with that response, and it's quite telling about people's character.

Well then let us hear about it. Elaborate for us will you, please

[QUOTE]Yes and likewise, telling someone what not to do depending on the motive. The question thought is, how many listen to what they are supposed to do, and how many don't? And of those who listen, how many do what they are told to do?

just an example...

The article addresses this issue head on, and even proves the end sentence.

I don't believe anything I read. I do enjoy cold beer though.