Brittani Banks
Persuasive Essay
December 12, 2013
Differences
“A child who is allowed to be disrespectful to his or her parents will not have true respect for anyone” said Billy Graham. Have you ever met a child that was so careless and so disrespectful that you could just get them and give them an old fashion beat down? Well I have! My O my, the thoughts that go through my head when I think of the children growing up today troubles my mind. This generation of children growing up is one hundred times worse than previous generations. Since the children’s behaviors have gotten worse over the years we don’t know what our future holds. Some of what children learn comes from what they see on television. How does television help the children’s mind if they are allowed to watch anything that keeps them occupied? They are being allowed to watch movies and television shows that have a lot of violence and profanity in them. Television today affects children’s mind on how they will react to certain things. According to a family and child development expert, author and lecturer with a PhD in Psychology Dr. Gail Gross, when children, especially young children, see violence on television, they have a difficult time differentiating between what is real or what is make believe, and tend to emulate or copy what they are seeing. Furthermore, there is a chemical change in the brain, similar to that which is seen in post-traumatic stress disorder. If enough violence is viewed, the brain reacts as if the person doing the viewing has actually been abused. If children are allowed to watch things with violence in them they will tend to grow up and think its ok to be a violent individual (Gross). Children tend to watch things with sexual content in them. No child should be able to watch family guy or American Dad. A child being exposed to sex at an early age gives them the thoughts that run through their head like, “hmmmm, I wonder if I can do that.” That’s how a lot of teen pregnancies happen because they learn everything from the television and not going to talk to their parents. My grandmother said Television isn’t the same now,” as it was back in her day. When she was growing up television was monitored that’s if they had a TV set, and there was no time to watch TV. They only had time to work.
Rebecca Collins, Ph.D. in social psychology, University of California, Los Angeles and director of Rand health, shows that The researchers measured levels of exposure to three kinds of sexual content on television: (1) sexual behavior, such as kissing, intimate touching, and implied or depicted intercourse, (2) talk about sexual plans or desires or about sex that has occurred, and expert advice, and (3) talk about or behavior showing the risks of or the need for safety in regard to sexual activity: abstinence, waiting to have sex, portrayals mentioning or showing contraceptives, and portrayals related to consequences, such as AIDS, STDs, pregnancy, and abortion. The results showed that heavy exposure to sexual content on television related strongly to teens’ initiation of intercourse or their progression to more advanced sexual activities (such as “making out” or oral sex) apart from intercourse in the following year.( Collins et al) “Youths who viewed the greatest amounts of sexual content were two times more likely than those who viewed the smallest amount to initiate sexual intercourse during the following year, or to progress to more-advanced levels of other sexual activity. In effect, youths who watched the most sexual content “acted older”: a 12-year-old at the highest levels of exposure behaved like a 14- or 15-year-old at the lowest levels.” (Collins et al).
Growing up as a child my mother monitored me on what I could watch and what I couldn’t watch. Some of my TV shows showed me real life situations. I thought that if it happened to me then I could handle the same situation the same way as I seen on TV. Children today feel the