Teaching Our Kids to Kill

¶ … Teaching Our Kids to Kill

This statement pretty much shows us how children, in this case a seven-year-old, copes or reduces his own fear by pretending he is Freddy Krueger. The child concludes that through this mechanism, he successfully overcomes the feeling of being scared.

I would like to discuss this statement by breaking this down into two focal components, i.e. The concept of fear and identification and eventual heroic fantasies with an aggressive hero. Fear is defined as "a reaction to immediate danger" (Kring et al., 2007, p.122). Fear is a normal feeling and there are various ways of coping with this feeling. There are productive ways of coping with fear, and on the downside, there also negative ways of coping with it. In this case, the child's mechanism of dealing with fear is counter-productive because he resorts to "escaping" the reality. This leads us to the second important component of this statement, i.e. fantasizing that he is indeed an aggressive heroic character. The child escapes his fear by fantasizing that he is somebody else, i.e. someone with superhuman capabilities. This mechanism denies him of the process of rationalizing his fear in order to better deal it with.

But how was he able to come up with this? It can definitely be argued that such thinking is largely attributable to the violent television programs that child watches. More than anything else, this has very important implications with his future actions. It is widely known to us that there is indeed a significant relationship with a child's aggressive behavior and watching aggressive films/movies. This observation was extended further by the longitudinal study by Huesmann et al. (2003) which proved that exposure to violent media significantly affects young adult aggressive behavior for both males and females. Moreover, identification with aggressive TV characters (like what was demonstrated by the child in this statement) also predicts aggression in later life.

Statement 3

According to this statement, there are three things that you need in order to shoot and kill: a gun, the skill, and the will and that killing simulators already give you the skill and the will to actually kill a human being.

Video games such as flight stimulators can already teach a young child the three principles mentioned above. A flight simulator video game is usually combative in nature and aimed at targeting particular entities. It is able to teach a young kid to effectively kill by inadvertently mastering the "skill." Using the stimulus-response model, the child will associate achieving the game's objective (i.e. winning) by being good at the game. And this involves mastery of the game. It can be expected that the child will repeatedly play the game in order for him to achieve his objective. This is driven by the child's will of achieving the objective which directs him to the combative nature of the game. The concept of the gun no longer needs to exist on the material level as this is reduced to the instrument of achieving the will by the mastery of skill. The gun now exists in the conceptual realm. Even if children have never fired a weapon before, the skills, learning, and will developed while playing the video games are more than enough for them to learn about firing a weapon.

Further extending the application of the stimulus-response model, it can also be argued that weapons such as guns are being heavily associated with numerous components of flight simulators such as killing. Weapons such as guns are associated with the feeling of being able to kill or assault the enemy in the video game. Unfortunately, these interest or passion for weapons is oftentimes also associated with real life weapons. To prove, news of children playing guns or accidentally firing real guns are nothing new today. Just early this year, two-eight-year-old boys uncovered a gun and fired into the playground (see Pierce & Stoltz, 2009).

Statement 5

The fifth statement of this assignment is brief but very meaningful and insightful. It simply says, "Don't just stand there…do something."

I have learned that to some extent the issue of media violence and children exposure to them has become mundane to most of us. Some even tend to associate aggressive media with the gender socialization of male children.

Violent programming is something that has been a part of our childhood that we tend to neglect them. Consequently, we become less critical of them. This opens me to the pervasiveness of media violence. Even if it is already widely known that exposure to violent media affects child development, the efforts to condemn them are rather measly. This also opens me to the fact that media, toys, or video games are crucial transmitters of certain values that we have to constantly keep an eye on.