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Media On Teens And Children

Negative Impact of Media on Teens and Children
Today in our society you can’t watch TV without seeing or hearing about sex, you can’t listen to the radio without hearing foul language, or hearing about drugs or related scandal. It’s affecting our society as a whole and more importantly, our younger generation.
Television is a huge concern of conflict with teenagers of today. Over the last 20 years, research has been done to examine how the violence shown on TV has impacted children and teenagers. It doesn’t impact all children and it won’t impact all children in the same way. There have been three major points discovered about teenagers and television. An increased amount of fear has been noticed in girls, because they are most likely to be portrayed as victims and that causes them to have fear of the world around them. The children’s shows even show violence in cartoons. The violence is shown as a humorous situation, but by watching the actions the child can become desensitized and not realize what violence is in a realistic manner. The child can also experience aggressive behavior. The younger groups of children are most likely to imitate the behavior after viewing a movie or TV show.
Today’s kids have sexual content shown to them every single day. According to a study done in 2001, three out of four prime time TV shows contained sexual references. Comedies topped the list with almost 34% containing highly sexual content. Sexually charged shows had 10% including references to safe sex, or the risks of irresponsible sex. With the shows that showed teens in sexual situations, only 17% contained words to sense to safe and responsible sexual relations.
The media has also played a large role with girls and a healthy body image. Since World War II, the media has shown women’s bodies in public readings, but every year the “ideal” women gets thinner and thinner, and the males get more muscular. The media has also taught girls what body size is found to be...