Sitting in school, little Jane sits anxiously watching the clock. The teacher is talking to the class, but Jane just can''t wait to get home. When the bell finally rings, she runs out of the classroom, and all the way home. After blasting in the house, she runs to turn on the TV. Having nothing more exciting to do, Jane will sit in front of the television until her mom pulls her away for dinner. This is an all to familiar scenario in many American homes today. What many people don''t realize are the problems that can develop from young children watching too much TV. Many emerging dilemmas are resulting from this concern. When a young child with a maturing brain sits in front of the TV for several hours every day, it can instigate loss of creativity, impatience, and violence further along down the road.
The ability to be creative is an important factor in the development of a young child''s mind. By sitting down and watching TV for a couple hours, the child is entertained, but is also not thinking. Information in spoon-fed to them, so when it comes time to read a book in school, some can have a hard time grasping ideas. They are so used to having images flash before them to provide understanding; they have trouble moving their eyes side to side to gather the information for themselves. With the TV in front of them, supplying amusement, they may never stop to think that putting a puzzle together, or reading a book could also be fun. They could actually become dependent on this one source of fantasy, and never bother to create their own. As the child grows older, it is less likely to put effort into playing with other kids, or taking up a hobby.
While losing creativity, the child can also gain impatience. By having all the stories and facts plastered clear in front of them, they can easily loose interest sitting in a classroom all day. Even during their favorite TV show, there is a brief change of pace in the story line when a commercial comes on, which is about every seven minutes. Their attention spans are being molded by this continuos interruption, causing them to loose focus easily. Research has shown that teachers today are using many more multimedia devices to capture the students attention. Being so used to seeing information provided by the TV, they are more responsive to learning with it in school, and are more likely to remember it.
In “Television Harms Children”, Ann Vorisek White claims that the intellectual and cognitive development of children who frequently watch television is threatened. To support this claim, she points to the findings that “the more television children watch, the weaker their language skills and imaginations” (White, 2006). Before the brain fully matures around age 12, it is in the stage of rapid development. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) “recommends that children under the age of two not watch TV or videos, and that older children watch only one to two hours per day of nonviolent, educational TV” (White, 2006). A study from the AAP (as cited in White, 2006) found that the average American child watches four hours of television every day. Considering "expression and reasoning are not automatic" abilities, young children who routinely watch television eventually become "passive and nonverbal" to stimuli in their environment (White, 2006). Since the normality of curiosity and imaginations of young children are the foundation of how they learn, remaining passive for extended periods of time affects their intellectual and moral development.
Television is a distraction for children and can hurt their cognitive abilities if they watch too much because it is non interactive. In the International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity Helena Duch and colleagues mentioned that the American Academy of Pediatrics advises, “parents avoid exposing children 2 and under to screen media, a nationally representative survey found that 68% of children under the age of 2 use screen media in a typical day, and that average screen time was 2.05 hours per day” (Dutch et al 2). Children live in a world full of screens, ranging from iPhones, TVs, to tablets and computers. Drastic brain development occurs during the ages of 1-3 and exposing them to too much screen time of any kind can have negative effects on them (Hopkins 27). Putting them in front of a screen also steals away from times they could be talking, playing, and interacting with their surroundings. Pediatrician Dr. Michael Rich claims that shows d...
However, that does not mean that inequalities no longer exist between the two genders, the pay gap between men and women is one of the larger gender inequalities seen today. According to an article “ Explaining the Pay Disparity Between Women and Men in Similar Jobs” the authors state that, “ equal pay ranked higher than health care, family and medical leave, pensions and social security for most important legislative issues” (Hessaramiri,Kleiner 3). People want something done about this injustice and are looking towards the government to intervene. The Equal Pay Act is one of these interventions put in place to make employees under the same profession paychecks’ equal no matter the gender. After forty years though, the Equal Pay Act has done little to stop the pay gap from continuing. Hessaramiri and Kleiner inform us that, “ According to the Monthly Labor Review, the weekly earnings of women were lower than that of men for full time employees across all broad occupational categories” (4). Most of the time these employees suffering from the pay gap do not even realize that they are being
Anderson, Daniel R., et al. Early Childhood Television Viewing and Adolescent Behavior. Ed. Willis F. Overton. Boston: Blackwell Publishers, 2001. Print.
To understand the theory of gender inequality better, it is necessary to confront the obstacles that have limited prior attempts. Amongst these, one the most important ones is the strong urge to minimize all explanations of gender inequality to some fundamental contrast between the sexes.
Pride and Prejudice exists to show the world that first impressions are not always correct. In fact, they are hardly ever correct. Jane Austen wrote this novel to show that the circumstances in which one was born cannot be changed, but through self-knowledge and exposure to correct ideals one could improve themselves. Austen criticized the influence others, such as family and friends, had on one’s decisions. She also criticized the way the people in her time were caught up with reputation and appearances instead of character. The themes in this book are marriage, family, prejudice, pride, and class.
During the 20th century, the literacy rate in America has begun to fall at an alarming rate. A factor contributing to the problems in the literacy rate includes children’s exposure to television which has resulted in a shortened attention span during other activities. Today, children are less active because of technology such as television and video gaming and, as a result more children are suffering from obesity.
The novel Pride and Prejudice, is a romantic comedy, by Jane Austen. Pride and Prejudice is a story about an unlikely pair who go through many obstacles before finally coming together. Pride is the opinion of oneself and prejudice is how one person feels others perceive them. The novel, Pride and Prejudice, uses plot, the characters of Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy and Miss Elizabeth Bennet, and the status of women and social standing, to portray the theme of the novel - pride and prejudice.
Dowsnen, Steven. “How TV Affects Your Child.” N.p. October 2011. Kid’s Health.Web. 20 November 2011.
The Department of Education states that television is viewed an average of three to five hours per day by children. Too much television can have an everlasting affects on children, such as violent behavior, aggressive behavior, poor school performance, obesity, early sexual activities, and early drug and alcohol use. Television can affect children both physical and psychological (qtd. in Graham 1). Some argue that television does not affect children; it can be very educational
By nature, most students are brought up in an academic environment motivated to get A’s and B’s on their report cards. Those grades sometimes don’t thoroughly report how much a student has learned or gained knowledge in each topic. Some instructors throw in factors totally unrelated to learning, when the main objective of academic institutions is to learn. In order to clearly demonstrate how much a student has learned in the classroom, schools should change their current grading system and teach students how to learn.
There are many facts that show how children are affected by television. The most obvious is the effects that television has on the brain. 'Television interferes with the development of intelligence, thinking skill and imagination.';(LimiTv) A huge element of thinking is taking from what you already know and deciding how it applies in different situation. School makes you do this, but television does not. Michael and Sheila Cole, sociologist, say that 'Children socialized to learn from television had lower than normal expectations about the amount of mental effort required to learn from written texts, and tended to read less and perform relatively poorly in school.';(Development of Children 24) Which means that it takes very little effort to follow a television show and kids are raised on television believe that it takes less effort to learn from television rather than books because they have been 'spoon-fed'; information by television. 'Opportunities for a child's imagination to develop are also denied by habitual viewing.'; (Neural Activity and the Growth of the Brain) Children need some unstructured time to allow imagination skills to form by thinking about a book or story, a conversation, or an event.
‘ Gender inequality in the workplace refers to the income disparity between the wages of men and women around the world. This term primarily describes discrimination against women.’
In United States, “Children watch 4 hours of television every day, 28 hours a week and, sometimes, 10 hours on Saturdays and Sundays. Before their 18th birthday, children may view 25,000 hours of television” (Ni Chang 85). Nowadays, technology has been developed and used in many different ways. Many children spend large amount of time on IPad, smart phone, and computer. Clearly, television has played an important role in most of the younger age group’s life. As a parent, one of the biggest concerns about the influence that television has on the children is that they tend to become aggressive while they watch a lot of violent program. Communicating and engaging with one and other is limited because television has destroyed communication among family and removed children from the social interaction. Moreover, watching a lot of TV also contributes child obesity. Overall, television is harmful for children in their early development because it is not only going to delay their brain development, but also increase their aggressive behavior, and cause child obesity in a long term period.
Benefits of watching television at the young age would be that children’s social skill, emotional skill and creativity can be improved by watching the talk shows; it is proved by a study. For example, Children can learn how to communicate with other people and how to react properly when they are asked to response. In addition, TV shows such as C.S.I Miami, Criminal Minds and Bones can teach children how to think logically and stragically. Although books can transfer the knowledge to the young generations, but it has limitations that certain facial expressions and body languages cannot be transferred by few words. Furthermore, the beautiful images of the nature on the tv screen can let the children to take a long travel from their home to the deep in the ocean, top of Mt.Everest or middle of Sahara the dessert.