Violence

It seems whenever you turn a television on today regardless of what you watch you are bombarded with visuals of violence. There are some very serious issues being brought up such as how is the television negatively affecting today's youth? Are we setting ourselves up for a generation of violent, ADD suffering, desensitized TV addicts?

There are some serious potential issues that come up regarding television and its impact on children; specifically I'll start with violence on television. One of the issues includes desensitizing our youth to real life violence. If our youth are being constantly fed images of violence are they going to be more likely to not be affected by some sort of violent incident when it really happens to them?

One of the main problems with television violence and its impact on youth is the fact that whenever someone commits an act of violence on television there is almost never any negative recourse. Characters on TV don't have to sit down and think about the repercussions of their actions or the emotional struggle they might go through. Everything always works out in the end on television, giving kids a false sense of reality.

Being brought up on the idea of no recourse for doing violent things to people can lead to a very potentially dangerous situation.

Prevention of having your child being impacted too much by the violent things we see every day can be fairly simple. Most important thing to do is make sure you take an active roll in monitoring what your child is watching. Practicing things like watching television with your child, setting limits on the amount of television your child can watch, turning the television off during things like dinner and study time as well as having a clear understanding with your child as to what is acceptable and not acceptable for them to watch are also very important. There are also tools out on the market to help assist parents in limiting what their kids can watch such as the V-Chip and the TV rating system.

The V-Chip and TV rating system work hand in hand to allow parents to block programming they don't feel is appropriate for their children. Every show on television is now rated with an easy to understand scale giving parents an idea of what age group the program might be best suited for. The rating scale has six different levels, TV-Y (all children), TV-Y7 (seven and above), TV-G (general audience, usually ages), TV-PG (parental guidance suggested), TV-14 (may be unsuitable for those under 14) and TV-MA (Mature audiences only) .

Times are definitely changing in our culture, of the research I did one of the most disturbing factoids I came across was this: "The seven top problems in public