Effect of Watching Television of Young Children

EFFECT OF WATCHING TELEVISION OF YOUNG CHILDREN
Television has become the most popular daily media tool of everybody around the world nowadays. It has been modernized through many years by technology engineers. Many people have taken advantage of it because it gives them entertainment and great profits. In our textbook “Born to Talk” by Lloyd M. Hulit and Merle R. Howard, they clearly said that watching television is greatest damage to young children throughout their language development stage. I definitely agree that point of view is very true especially for the children spending many hours daily in front of television. By spending too much time on it, it will limit the imagination of children with the real life and cause greatly negative effect on the language development in their brains.
Before television hasn’t been invented, people only use magazine or newspaper to get the information around their country. But when the television has come out, it made a huge change in people life in both positive and negative side. At the beginning, the television came only with black and white color screen; it’s mostly being used to broadcast the reports of important news around the country. Throughout many technology developments, it has improved a lot with colored screened, entertainment, music channel and much more. So what should we think about its change? Is it good or bad? Almost everything in our world always has 2 sides: positive and negative. It depends on how we use it to make it looks good or bad. When it changed from colorless to colored screen, from big design to flat thin design, from low quality view to high quality view, many people spent a lot of money to buy new television. Television has become one of our most daily needs in our life. Watching television after work or school also has become our daily habits which most every family around the world spend time on it. People can watch it anytime they want to depend on their free time because television channel is available 24 hours nowadays. They can watch news, movies, music, sports games and etc. For an adult people, it may not get much affected to the brain system by television because adult is old enough to realized which is right and which is wrong. Adult can used their brain to think and analyze what is happening on the television. So it depends on how we use the brain and imagination when watching television. Meanwhile, for the young children in their development stages, the television can be harmful to them if their parents can accommodate their kid’s schedule on watching television.
There are countless debates on how bad or good television cause on young children. First, I will tell about the harmful effects which are confirmed through many researches and studies. First of all, watching too much of television will decrease the visual of their eyes. That’s why many kids nowadays wear glasses at very young age. The effects of the television screen will still cause bad effects on the eyes no matter what how much developers improve its quality. It also causes young children become obesity because they sit down all day to watch it. Their body won’t get any exercise or moving, it will cause obesity day by day. By spending too much time on television, young children also lack of communication with people in their real life such as friends, parents and relatives. When they get addicted to it, it’s very hard to take them away from television. According to our textbook “Born to Talk”, the authors defined the importance of language development in young children during the preschool year: “It is interesting and significant to note that the preschool child, certainly by the time she is four years old, not only engages social dramatic play, but she understands that it is representational” (81). This has been proven by many psychology studies. Watching television will cause them know a lot of new things which isn’t suitable at their young age. Most of the times, learning or knowing a lot is good and can be considered as smart. But sometimes it can become negative effects to know certain things at that age. According to John Cacioppo, He has said that “loneliness can lead people doing things that isolate from others. They will feel unsafe around others and will not spend their time like others normally do” (Cacioppo, 54). It’s very true with young children even with adults. Children will lack the social communication with the environment around the real life; it will cause the delay on their language development because most of them won’t talk when watching television. Children cannot do two things at the same time at young age. So if they concentrated in watching their cartoon, they will likely put surroundings on the side of their head. These cause great negative effects on their language development.
Today, the imaginations of young children are slowly extinct by the improvement of Television. Almost everything can be seen on Television nowadays, it will kill young children’s imagination in their developed age. Other negative effects on the Television are its adult contents. Many movies and television shows are very bad for young children. Nowadays, there are many action movies which show fighting, robbing, killing scenes. When children watch these scenes, it will go deeply in their mind because young children learn and remember things very fast. It will last long on the children’s mind. When they grow up with that bag image in their mind, they will try to behave as the character on the movie because kids really love to copy things. Today, when I read news about the 5 years old boy fighting, it’s no longer unexpected to me. This is very dangerous to children because it will put them in danger. This impact is mostly caused by the television content because their parents cannot accommodate on what children should watch and what should not watch. Another negative effect is autism. Autism is also one of the major disorders that are occurring on many young children nowadays. “According to the National Society of Autistic Children, autism develops in 4 out of 10,000 children, and it is more common in males than females by a ratio of 4:1. The onset of autism usually occurs before thirty months.” (Hulit 414). In the future, I bet that the amount of autism appear in the young child will greatly increase if the parents cannot control their television schedule. Since children are easy to get addicted, parents should set a daily schedule with how long they should watch television. Children need to go out such as park, events around the city to learn the new things in real life. They need to have social interaction with the environments and the society, without it, autism is really likely to occur to the child.