Media Role Models and the Effect on Children

Media construct our culture, and the media we use to communicate with one another shapes our perception of reality. Our society is centered on media, it is the most influential factor in constructing our culture, but is it a positive culture? If we examine the effect that media has on children, we can say that it breeds a harmful culture, one that throws values and morals out the window. This is because the media is profit driven and has developed its own code of ethics of "anything-goes". As a result, children are exposed to things that they should not necessarily be exposed to yet and as a result it rushes their mental development and in fact moulds their mentality. This is a scary fact because these children's minds are susceptible to the trickery of those who run the media. With the media luring in the children, they are able to sell their own value system to the kids through actors, cartoon characters, and even musicians who are puppets in the media's propaganda. They in turn tend to become role models to the kids and can influence the children and manipulate their behavior, their fragile minds, and value system as they try to emulate their Role Models. Developmental psychology and children's marketing have a long history of close alignment, so media personalities such as actors, musicians and cartoon characters play a major role in shaping a child's mindset, and with the kind of images that these people portray it is not necessarily the best type of thing that we should expose children to.
First of all we must understand why these media personalities appeal to children, what makes them so popular and why children emulate them. All children from the ages of 12 and under, and teenagers all try to fit in with different social groups of other children, in essence they all try to be ‘cool' so that they would be liked and accepted into the social group by other kids. All children have their insecurities of not being liked and accepted by others, so they