A report released March 2 from the Parents Television Council showed that children’s television regularly contains violence.


“Programs like Teen Titans
on the Cartoon Network and ABC Family Channel’s Mighty Morphin Power Rangers often feature intense fights with swords, guns and lasers, the group said.”
Dr. Michael Rich
, Director of CMCH, said “Violent cartoons can increase children’s anxiety, desensitize them or lead them to believe
that violence is more prevalent — and acceptable — in real life than it really is.”

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“Proposed legislation to boost fines broadcasters face for indecency
violations is ‘too broad and too big’ and needs to be narrowed for
quick passage, Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas said on Thursday. He noted that the legislation should get an extra push from a new study released on Thursday by a parents’ group which said children’s
programming contains sexual content as well as numerous violent scenes.”


Dr. Michael Rich
, Director of CMCH, said that television shows are a powerful influence, and parents would send broadcasters a message by turning off programs they find offensive.

“I’m not sure legislation and fining them will do anything besides raising the cost to consumers,” he said.

A study released March 2 from the Parents Television Council analyzed 443.5 hours of Saturday-morning and after-school
shows for children ages 5 to 10. The results “showed ‘staggering’ amounts of violence, as well as verbal abuse,
offensive language, antisocial attitudes and behaviors, excretory content, disrespect for adults and sexual content.”

Dr. Michael Rich
, Director of CMCH, said research has shown that “children younger than 8 are developmentally incapable of distinguishing between fantasy and reality.”

“A study released March 2 from the Parents Television Council showed that even after cartoon violence is taken out of the mix,
programs aimed at 5 to 10 year olds have almost twice as much violent content as adult primetime shows.”

Dr. Michael Rich
, Director of CMCH, says the shows are having an impact. “Particularly in young children,
that plays out in terms of sleep disturbance nightmares, anxiety and even post traumatic stress disorder.”

“How much TV is OK for kids to watch? And are some shows better than others?”

This article explores the answers to these questions and describes research by CMCH Senior Scientist Dr. John Murray
:


“Scientists using MRI technology have found [that] turning on the TV doesn’t mean turning off your brain…
Though the brain is surprisingly engaged in making sense of what’s on television, not all the surprises were good ones.

The researchers found that a part of the brain implicated in post-traumatic stress disorder kicked in when watching violence on TV.”


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“Decades of research have established that television and other screen media – movies, the Internet, and video games – constitute a powerful environmental influence on children’s health and development, according to the Center on Media and Child Health at Children’s Hospital Boston.”

Dr. Michael Rich
, Director of CMCH and Harvard Medical School alumnus ’91, “understands the powerful clutch media can have on the mind, especially the mind of a child. So well has research documented the connection between watching violence on television and aggressive behavior, he says, that the correlation is ‘stronger than those linking calcium with bone density and passive smoke with lung cancer.’”



Rich says that “parents and physicians need to be educated about the science. To this end, Rich has developed a website that offers a searchable database of all the multidisciplinary research on the health effects of using media. So far, his team has collected nearly 8,000 studies, already one-eighth of which browsers can search online.”