We all know children of all ages are impressionable, whether it’s young kids trying to be like their parents or teenagers trying to act like their friends. This is why adults try to monitor what children are exposed to with maturity ratings things like television shows, movies, music, and video games. These ratings do not only apply to children, they apply to everyone depending on their mental capacity.
People learn what is good and bad through experience or through Albert Bandura’s Social Learning theory. If we go by the Social Learning theory, if a person sees a consequence happen for a certain action, like someone getting hurt, that person will try to stay away from that action, or if we see a reward for a certain action we are more likely to repeat the action. If we do not see a consequence or a reward for an action we do not know if the action is good or bad, especially for a child who hasn’t fully grasped the concept of right and wrong. As I stated earlier, children are impressionable because of their developing brains and using the Social Learning theory, which states we learn by observing the behaviors of other, we see why violence can be bad.
We’ve seen countless news stories where deaths of children by the hands of other children are blamed on media content. For example the case where Lionel Tate, a 12 year old boy, wanted to try out wrestling moves on his 6 year old cousin because he thought that she would walk away unharmed like the professional wrestlers on television do. At the time 12 year old Tate weighed 170 pounds where his little cousin only weighed 48. Tate was later convicted of first degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. More can be read about the story at the following link:
Using the above story as an example, if a child sees an action that normally carries harmful consequences performed without resulting in said consequence than they immediately will think that it is okay for them to try it out. So when actors or wrestlers perform violent stunts that are normally dangerous without getting hurt, then the children will think they will not get hurt either if they decided to try it out. If an actor, though, does perform a violent stunt where they do get hurt, a child will more than likely stay away from that action because the one things children dislike as much as getting told no when they want something, is getting hurt.
No comments:
Post a Comment