Article Review of The Effects of Television on American Children Health


The Effects of Television on American Children Health
By: Fikky Aulia Novianti
The condition of American children and adolescents to television continues to overstep the time they spend in the classroom. They spend the time to watch an average of mostly three hours of television per day, based on recent Nielsen data. Based on surveys of what children watch,12.000 violent acts were seen by the average child annually,14.000 about sexual references and innuendos, and nearly 20.000 advertisements. The messages communicated through television were particularly vulnerable by children and adolescents which influence their perceptions and behaviors. Most younger children cannot differentiate between what they see and what is real. Although there have been data documenting educational benefits from television viewing, there had negative health effects been resulted from television exposure in areas by significant research. The negative effects are violence and aggressive behavior; sex and sexuality; nutrition and obesity.
The Benefit Effect of Television on Children Health
The first benefit effect of television on children's health is an educational benefit. The educational benefit is the imitation of prosocial behavior. These imitate behaviors are exposed to children to models exhibiting. The evidence that children learned the prosocial content of the television programs were provided and generalized to a number of real-life situations by Friedrich and Stein. In addition, the prosocial programs increased helping behavior in situations similar to and different on television were also able to be shown by them.
            The American educational television program for children over the age of 3 years, with the initiation of Sesame Street, significant research was conducted. Most of the studies stated that children who watched the most learned the most. The impact of viewing Sesame Street presented that viewing predicted significantly improved vocabulary of 3 and 5-year-old children's scores on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test.
The Negative Effect of Television on Children Health
            Besides the beneficial effect of television on children's health, there is also showed a negative health effect as violence and aggressive behavior. Violence and aggressive behavior are two violence that impacts children significantly. National Television Violence Study investigated most of 10.000 hours of television programming and found that 61% contained violence. The violence is portrayed in rock music videos that contained violent acts, and weapon carrying. Recent data analyses examining the relationship between violence and aggressive behavior in children concluded that the condition to explain violence on television was identified consistently with children's aggressive behaviors.
            The next effect of television that causes a negative impact on children's health is sex and sexuality. Sex and sexuality are two of the other violence from television. American television is highly sexualized in both programming and advertising. American program television as family hour shows contains sexual references, and the incidence of vulgar language has raised extensively. There are sex education programs but only provide to school as a leading source of information about sex. However, there are significant studies that illustrate television's powerful influence on teenagers' sexual attitudes, values, and beliefs.
            The last effect of television that also causes a negative impact on children's health is nutrition and obesity. Nutrition and obesity are the most dangerous causes. It can cause obesity. The common obesity among children and adolescents has increased and fitness has decreased over the past three decades. It is actually from advertised products on television programs aimed at children. In addition, the consumption of food occurs during both commercials and programs. They will eat the amount of food and not aware of their health.
Whether or not the effect of television on children's health proves viable in the long term. Although this case especially focused on the unhealthy effects of television viewing on children and adolescents, some television programs have been displayed to promote prosocial behaviors and have positive educational effects in young children. American children are not the only ones that are faced with this problem. Parents in another country must be the same as two 1997 surveys, with a sample size of mostly 1500 parents, found that less than half of them report “always watching” television together with their children. It was researched by significant data, and this research will be much better with a joint effort.
Source : (this is my review article assignment on academic writing course) Miriam E Bar-on Author affiliations http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/adc.83.4.289

Comments