Young Children Impact of Television Watching

The Effects of Watching Television in Young Children
The current technological era has ensnared the young generation into a web of virtual reliance, making them dependent on various types of media outlets. The user – friendly components of media outlets have equipped the youngsters with the ability to customize any content into their own individual preferences. Young people are not limited to feeding but also they are able to design media materials which suit them. This situation is a far cry from what the older generation was inclined to while growing up, hence in most cases, this creates a generational conflict (Radesky, 2015).
The prevalence of technological and digital devices has created exposure among youngsters, with some being as young as 4 months. This is in comparison to children in the 1970s who became exposed to media such as the television from the age of 4 years. Research has shown that in 2015, the majority of babies from 1 – 2 years had already been exposed to and used mobile devices. Preschoolers were adept at using 2 or more digital media concurrently. Young adults do not shy away from being exposed to too many devices at once for a long period of time, an average of 8 – 10 hours. Research also indicates that 24% of teenagers confess to having an attachment to the Internet, 50% express feelings of addiction, which contributes to a high rate of mental disorders among teenagers (Radesky, 2015).
The intrusion of television in households has made it more of a necessity as opposed to a mere luxury tool. Babies have been exposed to the television in their early developmental stages, with the average four – month old baby spending 44 minutes watching television each day in Australia. Toddlers under two years spend an average of 1.2 hours on the television in the United States of America. Pre- teens in Britain have also been caught up in the web of watching TV and playing online games at an average of 5 hours daily (Barkham, 2009).
According to Chonchaiya and Pruksananonda (2008), watching television has its pros and cons but that the cons seem to outweigh the pros. In as much as watching television can inform and entertain the young ones, their social development suffers immensely as they lack time for outdoor play and social interaction with family and friends. In addition to that, there are no mechanisms to prevent the information obtained from watching TV from entering into the young minds. Thus they end up being easily influenced by advertisements which promote all sorts of products like alcohol, junk food which appeal to the youngsters.
Moreover, the characters portrayed in the television elude reality by far. Since the young ones are unable to distinguish what is acted on TV from the reality, their young minds develop a distorted perception about life and the society at large. They end up being exposed to negative social behaviors such as immorality and drug abuse from an early age (Mishra, 2015).
Needless to say, some television shows offer educative lessons to children. However, research shows that the negative effects of vices portrayed on TV shows have a wider ripple effect on viewers. When viewers observe their favorite characters exuding certain behaviors, they tend to want to identify with them by copying what they do. Research also shows that children are more at risk when it comes to being negatively influenced by aggressive behaviors portrayed on TV (Mishra, 2015).
The relationship between language development in infancy and television viewing is still vague. However, watching TV plays a vital role in the development of children in various ways due to the fact that TV is the most common form of medium in homes worldwide. Early childhood development requires children to be exposed to a stimulating environment to foster wholesome growth, therefore watching television also aids in this development, due to it being a stimulant (Barkham, 2009).
The early childhood developmental stage in children sets them up for language development, recognition of their environment and equips them with basic comprehension ability. Youngsters encounter a dialect blast between the ages of 3 and 6. At age 3, their verbally expressed vocabularies comprise of approximately 900 words. By age 6, expressed vocabularies extend drastically to anyplace somewhere in the range of 8,000 and 14,000 words. Amid early stages of childhood, youngsters are quite often ready to comprehend far a lot a larger number of words than they can express. Be that as it may, with this eruption of language, their expressive (verbally expressed dialect) capacities begin to make up for lost time with their open (capacity to grasp dialect) aptitudes (Chonchaiya & Pruksananonda, 2008).
Children specialists state that mental health in children is enhanced by: eye to eye contact with guardians or parental figures; allowing the children to explore their physical world; and imaginative critical thinking play. Electronic gadgets cannot fulfill this role. Essentially, any time spent sitting in front of the TV distorts the children’s ability in investing energy in other, increasingly significant mind building exercises. Despite the fact that some TV writing computer programs is designed for toddler advancement, inordinate TV watching can obstruct learning, trade off early youth improvement, and invigorate forceful or reserved conduct. There have been reports that TV has an unsafe impact on psychological capacities, for example, exploration. It also plays a huge role in speech delay in children. Besides, there have even been reports that there is no critical relationship between TV watching time and the semantic capacity of babies (Chonchaiya & Pruksananonda, 2008).
Early youth improvement is imperative for fruitful dialect procurement. Etymological advancement of youthful youngsters continues consistently from birth and 5 years after birth is outstanding as purported delicate period which is basic for dialect procurement. Particularly, newborn children from 18 to two years old experience "word-learning blast" in which words increment exponentially and, amid this period, sentences consolidating multiple words show up. Along these lines, understanding the connection between TV viewing and the dialect advancement of 2-year-old little children is a vital subject in dialect improvement contemplates, and enormous epidemiological investigations that can speak to the overall public are required (Chonchaiya & Pruksananonda, 2008).
Language development in children from zero to five years should be fostered and nurtured by proper childhood development. Exposing the children to television programs suitable for their age group, for instance kids songs, alphabet and number songs can have a huge impact in toddlers as it is in this toddler stage of 2 years that they develop strong language abilities (Schmidt et al, 2008).
Apart from what they view on TV, the most critical parts of language advancement in youngsters are the models given by guardians and parental figures. Maternal figures give constant technical models of expressions to enable their children to develop language abilities. More often than not, this requires slight changes in how the mother composes phrases and uses language. This is because they have to come down to be on the same level of understanding with the toddlers. Constant rephrasing by caregivers of any words uttered by children instills a language pattern in the memories of children, thus they are able to remember how to utter correct phrases in future. These techniques enhance proper language development in toddlers (Schmidt et al, 2008).
The presence of TV in homes has been found to affect not only the quantity but also the quality of interactions between children and their caregivers. Being engrossed in the television creates an involuntary passive response in caregivers, in instances where a child becomes inquisitive when the caregiver is watching TV. This is because the caregiver wants to concentrate on whatever they are watching. This passive response in turn diminishes the quality interactions. Frequent reductions in quality interactions can impede the language development in toddlers (Schmidt et al, 2008).
Another downside of the television is that even kid friendly programs and videos can disrupt the play process in children. Children learn by playing, thus play is a very vital part of childhood. Play enables children to develop cognitive, social, behavioral and motor skills. It cannot be substituted with any play related programs on TV, no matter how child friendly the programs are designed to be. There is no comparison between a child playing physically and one viewing playful programs on TV. Denying children the gift of play is second to being inhumane. It will simply disable their cognitive abilities (Schmidt et al, 2008).
Studies which support the above go further to describe how background television actually interferes with the mental flow of a child during play. It has been observed in experiments done on 2.5 to 6.5-years-old children’s reactions to three experimenter-initiated interruptions to an ongoing fantasy play sequence. These children are unable, however, to fully return to the play episode state of mind which they had before being interrupted. Furthermore, the intensity of the play episode reduced immensely even if they were able to return to that state. This goes to show that play time is sacred. Television viewing in infants and toddlers should therefore be limited or completely done away with to allow nature to take its course in early childhood development (Schmidt et al, 2008).







References
Barkham, P. (2009, October 13). Television – not in front of the children? Retrieved January 10, 2019, from https://www.theguardian.com/society/2009/oct/14/tv-children-harmful-effects
Chonchaiya, W., & Pruksananonda, C. (2008). Television viewing associates with delayed language development. Acta Paediatrica, 97(7), 977-982.
Mishra, M. (2015). Ethical, Legal and Social aspects of Information and Communication Technology. arXiv preprint arXiv:1507.08447.
Radesky, J. S., MD. (2017). Kids and Digital Media. Retrieved January 10, 2019, from https://www.mottchildren.org/posts/your-child/kids-and-digital-media
Schmidt, M. E., Pempek, T. A., Kirkorian, H. L., Lund, A. F., & Anderson, D. R. (2008). The effects of background television on the toy play behavior of very young children. Child development, 79(4), 1137-1151.