Writing Feedback / Television has brought positive or negative effects on children behavior. [4]

Television has brought many changes to the way many spend their leisure time. While some of these changes have been beneficial, others have had a harmful effect. To what extent you agree or disagree?

Television has become a large part of children's activities. Over the few past decades, there is continuing debate on the extent of the effects of media violence on children. This essay aims to argue that television and media have a harmful effect on children. The studies of the content of television have consistently a high degree of violence and aggressive present in most cartoon program.

It is argue that there is a strong link between TV violence and children aggressive behavior. According to Matthews and Ellis (1985), 80% of television program included violence. In addition, it is important that children spend their leisure time in watching TV should be controlled by parents (Knom, 1990). The problem is that cartoons contain the significant amount of violent scenes. It is clear that the effect of media violence on children in aggression is primarily the result of a cumulative learning process during childhood. Indeed, TV has undoubtedly contributed to children's knowledge of general behavior.

On the other hand, it has been TV program and media sometimes have a positive influence on children behavior whether it is education or entertainment. This effect has been attributed to observational learning in which children imitate the behaviors of the models they observe. There is an experiment illustrates how children learned from media for instance, Duncker (1938) showed children a film which the hero was eating and enjoying in food which children was dislike. The result after watching the film was 67% of children accept the food in affirmative behavior.

Moreover, Carter has demonstrated that cartoon may be an enjoyment for children in their social lives. It is suggested that TV program can produce excitement without causing disorder towards children. For example, the 'A' team program is unrealistic although, it achieves pleasure (Sparks, 1992). The main gist of these points was to display how children gain the beneficial from TV program and media.

However, it has been disputed that TV and media not necessarily have a good reflection on children according to imitation theory. That means children workout on what they learned depending on their perception (Smith and Jones, 2002). To illustrate this, Bandura did an experiment which children shown a film of treat with doll in a harmful way. This due to children who had shown the film did aggressive behavior more than children who had not seen the film when they leave the children to cope with doll were given. Clearly, seen from this perspective, children are more likely to imitate violence and aggressive behavior.

In conclusion, this essay has argued that TV violence is directly linked to aggressive behavior in children when they spend more time on watching cartoons program. Thus, it can be seen that the TV and media have played an important role in children behavior which may be positively or negatively. The current situation regarding aggressive behavior in media program is unclear. However, it is clear that researcher need to find out more reasons about the violence in children which could be innate in the future.