Cutting Down On Violent TV

According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, the average child will have seen 8,000 murders and 100,000 other violent acts on TV by the time he or she finishes elementary school.

Viewing violence on TV has been linked to aggressive, anti-social, and even violent behavior later in life, and can also result in children overestimating the threat of violence and crime in the real world. As far as a child’s wellbeing goes, reducing the amount of violent TV they watch is just as important as cutting down on the junk food they eat.

A groundbreaking initiative from a team of Oregon State University researchers is aiming to do just that. The researchers developed an intervention program, which was directed at elementary school children and carried out over a seven month period. The results of the study were recently published in the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology.

The curriculum focuses on teaching children how to make better TV choices. Instructors led children in grades 1-4 through 28 varied and entertaining lessons. Guest speakers, including a police officer who explained how rare it is for officers to be involved in the shoot-outs or car-chases so frequently depicted on TV, helped children better understand how and when violence occurs in the real-world.

Through interviews with the children before and after the intervention program, researchers determined that there was an average decrease of 18 percent in the viewing of violent programming. Eight months later the results still stood, with the children watching notably less violent TV. The children were also found to identify less with violent superheroes and more with high-achievers in everyday life, like athletes, doctors, and scientists.

Researchers hope that reducing the amount of violent TV that children watch will in turn help to reduce the violent behavior linked to those programs. The next step is to directly involve teachers rather that the research team, in the hope that many more classrooms can adopt the curriculum and help children make wiser TV choices nationwide.