Effect of violence seen on Television

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The Effects of Violence Seen on Television

One Saturday morning when I was five years old, I was watching an episode of the Roadrunner on television. As Wile Coyote was pushed off a cliff by the roadrunner for the fourth or fifth time, I started laughing uncontrollably. I then watched a Bugs Bunny show and started laughing whenever I saw Elmer Fudd shoot Daffy Duck and his bill went twirling around his head. The next day, I pushed my brother off a cliff and shot my dog to see ifs its head would twirl around.
Obviously, the last sentence is not true. The example above is an exaggeration of the effects of violence on television can have on children. To a five-year-old child, Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny are the pinnacle of “cool,” and they see nothing wrong with the violent stunts seen on television. The average child watches about two and half hours of television a day and witnesses twenty violent acts on those television shows each hour. In most actions movies, there is always a bad guy and a good guy. From observation of children, most children would prefer to be the bad guy because “the bad guy gets to the cool stuff,” as one child told me whom I was babysitting when I asked him why he wanted to be the evil monster in Power Rangers Dinothunder movie. What kinds of problems is this causing for our youth?
Children often behave differently after they have watched violent programs on tel...

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