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Research Paper
Mr. Mario Coello
3rd BGU “D”
2018-2019

Influence of TV shows on children’s behavior

Television has changed the American child from an irresistable force to an immovable

object. (Laurence J. Peter, 1977). Children’s exposure to the misuse of new

technologies, such as the television and the programs that are broadcasted in it, have

developed many serious problems in regulating their impulsiveness at social situations.

Children are the most vulnerable and smaller people at home, and at many situations,

we may think that they need a minimum care time, letting them to experience at their

own, and by consequence allowing them to choose what they want to do or watch in

their free times. Sometimes parents do not pay enough attention to what their kids are

watching when the television is on, permitting children to be exposed to any kind of

behavior shown by the characters portrayed on the TV programs.

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Through time, humanity has been searching different ways to improve their

daily life. They have developed new technologies and have been renewing them, lest

they get stuck with these developments. Unfortunately, these advances have led us to an

unconscious retrogression due to the improper use that we give to them. One of the

most important developments is the mass media, for example, we use social media to

keep in touch with our friends and relatives that are far away from us; or the television

and radio mainly used as an information resource. And nowadays, it has become one of

the most used tools, either if it is to get informed, or entertained. Many times, this mass

media is used as a way to entertain the whole family, especially in their free times. It is

very common to see a family gathering together in order to watch a movie, or a TV

show, whether it is a comedy, a cartoon, or even a thriller; and this time spent together

becomes a family integration moment, but sometimes this is the only moment that the

family shares together, without noticing that they are excluding the necessary

interpersonal communication.

However, even when this tool has positive effects such as the integration of the

family, or to keep us informed about the events that happen in the world; it also entails

negative consequences, that not only affect the household, but the whole society, such

as the dependence that we develop toward it or the influence that this media has over us.

As an important element of the mass media, we have the television. It presents a huge

variety of shows that can be used as a way of entertainment for adults and kids;

however, there are TV shows that can be considered as a problem, depending on the

values that it contains. The television works as a way of entertainment and distraction,

especially for the kids. Children tend to be in front of the television around 2 to 3 hours

(see Figure 1), depending on the care that they receive on their homes, and their free

time. “From the television children learn information, concepts, attitudes, behaviors,
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values and meanings, and often learn more of what they are not supposed to learn,

rather than what is desired to be taught.” (Perlado y Sevillano, 2003, p 169). As Perlado

and Sevillano said, this media has been used as a helpful mechanism of child’s positive

learning, but it can also be considered as an influential factor in the development of an

inappropriate behavior in the child.

In Ecuador, TV shows are classified in two different ways. The first and the

most used one, is the classification by ages, which is found in the Article 65 of the

Organic Law of Communication, in it there are 3 categories: the first type of programs

have suitable content for all ages, also known as Category A, here are included the

programs that can be watched by children and adults, they must not display violence in

any type, nor suggestive dialogues, and this programs can be transmitted at any time,

but preferably from 6hr00 to 18hr00; the second type of programs are suitable for all

age groups, with supervision of an adult, known as Category B, they are recommended

for people between 12 and 18 years old, and they may air from 18hr00 to 22hr00; the

last type of programs are suitable only for adult, known as Category C, and they can be

transmitted only from 22hr00 to 6hr00.

The second classification is according to the content of the TV programs, and it

is arranged by the Article 60 of the Organic Law of Communication. Here we have the

category I or informative content, Category O or opinion content, Category F or

educational content, Category E or entertainment content, Category D or sportive

content, Category P or advertising content, and finally Category PNC or no commercial

advertising content. This type of categories should be shown at the beginning of every

TV program, except Category PNC, this must be shown throughout the program.

In the content suitable for all ages or Category A, are the TV shows designated

for kids, this kind of shows are meant to entertain the kid and offer certain knowledge
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that are necessary for the kid at their age to obtain, such as social values. But

unfortunately, some of these programs do not contribute with anything beneficial for the

kid, instead they represent an issue for their education. “The Television may be positive

or negative, according to the coordination that exists between the programs that are

offered to the student at the school, and the ones that he or she can see at home, because

while the first ones are chosen by the teacher, the second ones, due to its variety, can

counteract the purposed pursued in the classroom if they are not properly selected.”

(Asencio, 2012, p. 23). Therefore, Category A programs have been divided into two

subcategories: Educational childish shows, and non-educational childish shows. Letting

people know which TV shows are beneficial for the child. However, not many people

pay attention to this subcategories, and think that all childish shows are suitable for their

kids. In educational childish shows, benefits and knowledge are exposed. These shows

are the ones that help kids to learn values, meanings, or new concepts, and in case that

the child has already learn them, they help to reinforce them. This kind of programs are

usually used in the academic field, because they stimulate and bolster cognitive

processes, skills, and multiple abilities. As an example of these shows, we can include

Dora the Explorer (see Figure 2), it helps children to learn certain words in English, and

train their memory. Another example, is Sesame Street (see Figure 3) that teaches

children how to add and subtract, and connect letters in order to formulate words and

sentences. In the other hand, non-educational childish shows, are those programs that do

not contribute with anything beneficial for the children. They use an inadequate

vocabulary and also display violent behaviors between the characters that children may

latter emulate. An adequate example of this kind of shows is Dragon Ball (see Figure 4),

a Japanese animated series that displays an elevated index of violence between the

characters (punches, fights with firearms, hateful dialogues, etc.) This program shows
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this kind of violence as something usual and common when we seek to defeat our

enemies. Another example is The Simpsons (see Figure 5), program that presents an

aggressive familiar coexistence, characters physically and verbally attack each other and

shows a high index of alcoholism. Also a reliable example is a Japanese anime named

Doraemon, this anime relates the life of Novita, a mediocre student, that does not pay

attention in classes, nor does homework, but he has some sort of special cat, which

comes from the future and magically solves all his problems. This program shows

violence between Novita and his classmates and gives children a bad example in the

educational field.

Just as the content shown in TV shows is important to be supervised before

showing it to children, also the time they are exposed to these shows represents another

important factor to their life and conduct. A lot of times when child arrives home, after a

large school day, the first thing they do is to watch television, but the bad thing is not

only the content shown in this programs, but that they see it in a really prolonged period

of time. Approximately, children spend between 2 to 4 hours in front of the television,

and this is nor healthy nor adequate for them, due to the fact that, in some form, they are

limiting themselves. Nowadays, recreative games are being changed by an afternoon in

front of the television watching a bunch of caricatures, which limit kids’ imagination

and recreation. Even though, sometimes television can be educational and useful for the

child’s learning process, many times the kid loses opportunities for being in front of it.

Activities such as games, exercise, reading books, painting, between others, are

suppressed in the diary life of the little ones, as it is easier to put them to watch a movie

or a show that is being transmitted in that moment.

The phenomenon of the violent content in television has been investigated with

two approaches, a positive one and a hermeneutic comprehensive. The first approach
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(Positive paradigm) defended by authors like Bandura & Walters, Berkowitz &

Friederich and Huston, says that television is an important transmitter of aggressive

behaviors that propitiate a modeled and conditioned learning of aggressive guidelines.

Kids with a high grade of exposition to this can exhibit a high incidence of hostility by

emulating the aggression that they are witnessing. The second approach (Hermeneutic-

comprehensive paradigm), defended also by an amplitude of authors, adopts an

integrating view between the psychic and the socio-cultural. (Perez-Olmos, 2005, p

72). Exposing kids during a long time to television, prevents them to develop affective

and intellectual skills. As the kid spends more time in front of the screen, he or she can

lose their empathy for others, or better said, does not get to develop it in its totality.

Furthermore, kids do not get time to talk about what they have seen or learned in

school. It is true that television can show some educative programs, but they must be a

topic of conversation between parents and kids, to exploit this obtained knowledge and

eliminated the unnecessary or bad. In a certain way, parents must learn which programs

are beneficious to their offspring and which are not. In addition, they must be educated

in which is the adequate time to expose their kids before televisions without reaching a

limit. All of this, with the purpose that the television becomes a helpful tool, and not a

problem.

Television can help to promote attitude or aggressive behavior of kids. Authors

such as Vygotsky posed that if we submit a kid to being close or watching violence, it

enlarges the possibilities that these aggressive behaviors appear in the kid, whether they

are through hits, inadequate words for their age, and violent answers to their parents,

between others. The television is a mass media element that transmits programs with

contents of different type, but almost all of them contain certain amount of violence, and

does not control who watches them (see Figure 6). A kid is someone who imitates most
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of the actions that they see in tv shows. In television, they transmit shows, whether they

are of violence, family entertaining, comedy, thrillers, etc. Then, due to the fact that the

kid imitates most of the actions they see, these can influence in their behavior. “As an

active receiver of television, the kid is a constant «apprentice». He learns from all types

of programs, from those aimed for children, and even from those aimed for adults.

(Perlado Y Sevillano, 2003, p.167). The television shows that the kid watches, bring

consequences that affect the same child and also their intrapersonal relationships. The

kid watches television when in general he does not have more activities to make. As it

has been mentioned earlier, the kid imitates what he sees in television and therefore can

adopt conducts that are not correct, given that he does not know how to differentiate if

what he imitates is bad or good. These conducts affect family, school, and the attitude

he has towards society. As expressed by Asencio (2012): “The imitation is the first

mechanism of learning that children have and these are not especially selective in what

they imitate, and they do it with both real models and people in televisions or cartoons.”

Kids do not easily imitate what they see; what they learn in the media is more than

imitation, as, from most of the quantity of conducts, images, attitudes and values to

which they are exposed, they only choose some of them. The child after observing

violent episodes may not act aggressively but this does not mean they did not learn an

aggressive solution. As they get older, the aggressive conduct reflects more the

intrapersonal style that each one is developing.”

The family plays an important role, as they are the ones who permit the child to

watch television, establish the time they are allowed to see it, and the type of shows

they can see. If they let the child watching shows that may influence in the bad behavior

of the kid, this will also affect the familiar relationship. The communication of the

infant will not be the same to the parents, but will start fading away little by little. Its
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mood may change and this will carry the mistreatment toward their parents or brethren.

Perez-Olmos, Pinzon, Gonzalez-Reyes & Molano (2005), explain it like this: “The

mental world of the kid its malleable, susceptible to changes so it requires an important

emotional and educational reinforcement from the environment, especially from the

family, and in general from the society. If during this period of developing maturity any

of these elements fails, other external influences that may be negative are facilitated” (p.

72)

The televisual shows seen before also affect the learning process of the kid. If they are

educational programs with high educative quality, they can help in a positive way in the

development of the knowledge. Then, these shows become tools that can be used in

favor of the mental growth of the kid. In the other hand, if they are shows with contents

that do not help in the developing of their cognitive processes, these will make the kid

not to grow intellectually. He will dedicate more time to television rather than to their

studies, which will provoke bad grades in the school.

A great amount of time of the kid’s life goes by in the school where it learns to

relate with other people that are not from their family environment, as their classmates.

The child in school reproduces by imitation all he has seen on tv shows whether they

are good or bad. Generally, these conducts of imitation are aimed towards their

classmates and teachers. If they are good conducts, the kid will improve in their

academical relations, which will help the kid mature in a good academical environment.

However, if they are bad, a hostile academical environment will be created, due to the

bad treatment towards his classmates, and this will make that they treat the kid violently

and make him have a bad formation in his relations. “The kid, due to the fact that they

have a plastic and very receptive mind with all that goes around them, tries to assume

and unconsciously interiorize all values, roles, rules, attitudes and wishes, that the
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televisual message offers him continuously. A great amount of students have very

internalized the negative attitudes of the televisual characters that, when they are

situated in front of the television screen, they see violence, fights, aggressiveness, bad

contestations, etc., as normal.” (Perlado & Sevillano, 2003. P 176). The television

shows have negative repercussions in the conduct of the kids, specifically the shows

with violent contents. The parents that allow the kid to watch programs with content

that shows fights, bloody deaths, aggressive or inappropriate dialogues, etc, will create

in the kid an aggressive behavior. These aggressive behaviors will be shown in the way

children treat their classmates, when they hit them or make some other violent action.

The negative effects provoked by the shows with violent contents create the

possibility that the kid resolves their conflicts with violence. This will mean that the kid

gets in fights with other kids by any motive just to imitate the violent conduct seen

previously in television. Due to the method to resolve problems is violence, this will

bring hostility from the other kids and this will cause that they don’t along get with him,

that they isolate him and this will affect even more in the child’s behavior. “In

developed societies, all this violence stays as something essentially negative, but we

dedicate to conjure it repeatedly through its staging. Like this, a new kind of violence is

born, the audiovisual one that is characterized by its virtual reality (the dead of

television do not smell bad, and resuscitates in the next movie). In this form, today’s

kids contemplate even more aggressiveness than before, however, the violence that they

watch is a senseless one, without tangible consequences, but that is until the kids imitate

the violent behavior and apply it to some other kid; that the virtual world becomes a real

tragedy.” (Aldea, 2003, p4). Another negative effect that the kid can develop is to have

less pain, whether it is physical or emotional. Each time the kid has violent conducts its

empathy developing starts decreasing. This provokes that in the future he may develop
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sociopath tendencies. In a physical level, it may cause to lose sensitivity in the skin. As

the kid grows, it would become more difficult his introduction to the society as a

positive and productive being. The violent shows can make the world seem as a bad and

dark place. It will give a wrong image of the school, describing it as an insecure place

that makes the kid to do not want to go there. The negative of this is that it creates a

certain feeling of fear when it comes to relate with his classmates. And sometimes, it

reaches the point where the kid does not want to go out even from his room and not

even relate with his close environment, the familiar one.

Studies indicate us that not only through observation and through direct

experience with something tangible gives us certain modelling guidelines that generate

aggression, but also all images that can function as a striking stimulus in a determined

context, being the most important one the mass media, such as the television and

nowadays the internet. The main information that generates aggressive conducts is

violent topic, like wars, murders, segregation and pornography (Chapi, 2012, p. 90).

Television shows have a great influence in the kid and his conduct. His conduct will be

molded depending on the shows he watches. If he sees shows with aims to help his

personal grow, he will repeat good conducts in any context he finds himself in. Instead,

if he sees bad contents his conduct will be aggressive and will not be of any help for the

development of his social relations, but rather these will be seriously affected.

Depending on the time the kid watches TV shows, his behavior will be affected. If the

kid watches TV shows for a long time, it will cause that the changes in his life become

harmful for him. These changes affect their scholar, familiar and social life. The

excessive time will make the kid to become idle, his academical performance will

decrease drastically, wanting only to watch tv, he will not relate with his classmates and

will isolate himself from these little by little until reaching the point of being alone.
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Children are beings that do not imitate everything they see, but rather something

that had an incidence in them. If they see a TV show, for example, the hero of a cartoon

that punches the villain to save the princess, he will repeat this in his school with his

classmates. For this reasons, the parents have a great incidence in the children’

behavior, as these are the ones who decide what they are going to see in television.

Collins, Berndt & Ress (1974) performed a study to assess the observational learning of

motives and consequences for television aggression. In this study, children viewed an

aggressive television program and were interviewed to determine their acquisition of

motive and consequence cues and their evaluation of the aggressor. The results showed

that younger children remembered aggression and aggressive sequences as well as their

outcomes, while the older children were much better at recalling motives. Younger

children evaluated the aggressor according to his/her actions alone; instead, older

children judged the aggressive actor by the motives behind his actions. This study infers

a strong conclusion that the younger the child, the less likely he or she will be able to

separate aggressive acts from motives.

As expressed, television constitutes an important medium widely used to

disseminate information to its viewers. It has the unique feature of combining audio and

visual technology and serves multiple purposes of entertainment, information, and

education. There is no doubt that television has a great influence on children from a

very early age itself and it does have an effect on children’s cognitive and social

development. Television has the potential to generate both positive and negative effects.

An individual child’s developmental level is a critical factor in determining whether the

medium will have positive or negative effects. Unfortunately, nowadays the misuse of

the television has made the society to be stuck into a big problem. Excessive TV

viewing has deleterious effects on learning and academic performance; also, it helps to
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develop aggressive behavior. Time spent with various media may displace other more

active and meaningful pursuits such as reading, exercising, or playing with friends.
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APPENDIX
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Figure 1

Time people spent in front of the television

Source: Ofcom, 2015

Figure 2 Figure 3

Dora the explorer, season 1 Sesame Street

Source: Nickelodeon, 2008 Source: Thefilmstage, 2010

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Figure 4 Figure 5

Dragon Ball Z The Simpsons

Source: ComicBooks, 2000 Source: IMDb. 2014

Figure 6

Violent scenes in each program

Source : Ncbi, 2006

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Asamblea Nacional del Ecuador. (2013). Ley organica de comunicaion: articulos

60 y 65. Registro oficial, tercer suplemento.

Asencio, D (2012). The tv programs and their influence in the initial education
“Coronela Filomena Chavez” (2012). (Tesis) Recovered from:
file:///C:/Users/Estudiante/Downloads/thesis%20television%20%20programs%20
DE%20education%.pdf

Chapi, J. L. (2012). A psychological review to the theories of aggressiveness.

Electronic Magazine of Psychology Iztacala, 90.

Pérez-Olmos, I. Pinzón, A. González-Reyes, R. y Molano, J. (2005). Influence of

the violent television in children of a public school of Bogota, Colombia. Public
Health Magazine , 72.

Perlado, L. y Sevillano, M. (2003). TV influence on children. Recovered in 2017,

from Editions University of Salaman:
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