Media violence harms kids

Watching too much violent TV and playing too many violent video games takes a toll on children's social and physical development, researchers report.
"We found that the more TV they watch, the less time they spend with their friends," said researcher David S. Bickham, a research scientist at the Centre on Media and Child Health at the Harvard School of Public Health.
However, "this relationship really only holds true for violent TV," he added. Another study found that violent video games appear to instill poor attitudes in children when it comes to their own health, while promoting risky behaviours.
A third report found that mature-rated video games often include explicit sexual imagery and language content not included on warning labels.
These and other studies devoted to the media's effects on children appeared in latest special theme issue of the journal Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.
In the first report, Bickham and a colleague collected data on 1,356 children ages 6 to 8 and examined how watching violent TV affected social integration.
The researchers found increasing amounts of social isolation among children with higher levels of exposure to violent TV programming. To explain this finding, Bickham speculated that, since violent TV is linked with aggressive behaviour in children, it makes it harder for these children to get along with other children. "Kids are watching violent TV, they are becoming more aggressive, and that aggression is making it more difficult for them to interact with their peers," he said.
In the second report, Sonya S. Brady, a post doctorate fellow in psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, and a colleague tested the reaction of 100 college men, 18 to 21 years old, to two video games.
"When the men played the more violent video game versus the less violent video game, they had greater increases in blood pressure, and had more negative emotions and hostile feelings," Brady said.
In addition, they had more permissive attitudes about alcohol and marijuana use, Brady said. "Video games cannot only influence aggression, but might also influence attitudes toward risk-taking behaviour," she said.
Brady's team also found that those who played the violent game were less likely to co-operate with others after playing the game. "Media violence may predispose young people and adolescents not only to greater health-risk behaviour, but also toward tension and conflict in their social interaction with others," she said.
In the third study, a team led by Kimberly Thompson, an associate professor of risk analysis and decision science at the Harvard School of Public Health, found that 81 percent of mature-rated video games have violent or sexual content not noted on the label.
In its study, Thompson's team played 25 percent of the mature-rated video games available.
"We found that the games contained depictions of substances or sexual themes or profanity that was not noted," Thompson said. These findings mirror findings the same team has noted in other video games rated for younger children, she said.
"Parents really need to pay attention to the actual experience of the game and to what their kids are seeing, because the content descriptors are not necessarily providing full information about what's in the games," Thompson said.
Other reports in the same journal issue found trouble with what children and teens are watching on TV. One report said that children exposed to violent media had a significant long-term increase in aggressive behaviours, aggressive thoughts, angry feelings and arousal levels.
And a fifth study found that children who watch more TV eat more and gain more weight than children who watch less. Another report revealed that, among teens whose parents expressed disapproval of teen sex, those who watch more than two hours of television a day may begin having sex at a younger age than those who don't.
Dr Dimitri A. Christakis, director of the Child Health Institute at the University of Washington and the co-author of a journal editorial commenting on the studies, believes that children's media is "really a public health issue. This is not simply about an industry and regulating an industry. It's about the health of our children."
Christakis said the challenge ahead is "to find ways to make media work positively for children. The real issue for parents and policymakers is how to make sure that this media environment serves our children's best interest."
The guidelines are needed for what makes up educational TV and video games, he said. Christakis thinks that advertising aimed at children should be outlawed. "We need to consider such action once we recognise media as a public health issue," he said.