Children, entertainment and violence
by Lolita Nikolova (.pdf)
2009 © International Institute of Anthropology, Salt Lake City, Utah, USA
2009 © Lolita Nikolova, PhD
Created: 06-03-09
2009 © Lolita Nikolova, PhD
Created: 06-03-09
References:
Bailey, D.W. (2005). Prehistoric figurines. London & New York : Routledge.
Cook, Donald E., Kestenbaum, Clarice, Honaker, L. Michael and Anderson, E.
Ratcliffe et al. (2000). Joint Statement on the Impact of Entertainment Violence on
Children Congressional Public Health Summit July 26, 2000. http://www.aap.
org/advocacy/releases/jstmtevc.htm
Encyclopedia of Irish and World Art. http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/sitemap-world-
art.htm
Murray, John P., Liotti, Mario, Ingmundson, Paul T., Mayberg, Helen S. Pu,
Yonglin, Zamarripa, Frank, Liu, Yijun, Waldorff, Marty G., Gao, Jia-Hong and Fox,
Peter T. (2006). Children's brain activations while viewing televised violence
revealed by fMRI. Media psychology 8, 1, 25-37.
Student’s website: http://www.iianthropology.org/psychology_childrenviolence.html
TV violence viewing transiently recruits a network of brain regions involved in the
regulation of emotion, arousal and attention, episodic memory encoding and
retrieval, and motor programming. (Murray et al. 2006)
We do not have a lot of memory moments in our brain from our childhood. But
there are some that we like to recall or they just come in our mind time by time.
One of my favorites is about when being abt 5 years old we liked to have played the
game, which was popular in Bulgaria – “partizani and apashi” . Within the years I
have been referring to this fragment in my memory to understand my
independence and the “maleness” in myself. I really liked this game, because I
lived in a small village with a crossing river and very narrow valley, surrounded by
mountains. So, the partizani with wooden guns early in the morning went to the
forest on the one side of the river, and the apashi – on the other. I still
psychologically have the feeling of the fear from my childhood in my mind “What
would happen?” but do not have any memory about any fighting. Probably both
groups never found each other.
It was about 1965, so just before and at the beginning of the first TV programs
in Bulgaria. Then, there was no TV influence, but we watched at that time many
Russian films about the Second World War and it was a tradition at least one a
week my grandfather or grandmother to have brought me to watch a movie. I think
they were only Russian films that I obviously accepted as Bulgarians, since I
thought “konets” (The end”) was a Bulgarian word. At that time I even lived with my
grandparents in one and the same apartment together with the family of Ivan
Okovski, who was the film operator there.
The game of “partizani” and apashi” was only one of many that we played
there. And I don’t think it was a bad game – it was more like an interaction with the
nature and I even now think that probably instead playing the game at certain
moment had switched to have been gathering forest flowers like wild violets. I had
such a wonderful childhood, that one of the reasons not to have my own children
today was that I have never made my life later to be able to provide my eventual
children with the childhood I had. I still believe that intensively interacting with the
nature is the best childhood. I also I think that if my brain time by time
demonstrates smartness if any, the main reason is that the first 6 years my food
did not come by stores like Walmart and Albertson’s but from our own garden and
our one farm – always fresh and healthy. My grandmother and grandfather were
dedicated to me to have felt healthy and happy as a child.
So, from my perspectives, it is not just a question of direct influence of the
violence entertainment on the children. The negative influence today of the violence
entertainment is a result of the general multiscale cultural environment, which in
many cases is not very healthy for the children. In this environemnt the violence
entertainment additionally overwhelms the children with direct or indirect negative
emotions. The reproduction of what we have seen is a complex process and we
even never know when certain experience will influence our current social
practices.
To demonstrate the complexity of the problem I will turn to the following
question: Do we have violence in our everydayness? The answer is yes. Then the
next question comes: Should we educate the children in violence? I believe so.
However, the question that we still cannot answer is what is the best means to
educate them in violence.
If you turn to the beginning of the human history, there are not many records of
violence within the visual art. Nevertheless, the cave painting with hunting scenes
(Encyclopedia) that include killing of animals can be accepted as a record about
violence. They have multilayered semantics, but for our topic we can point to the
fact that they were seen by the children. We do not have any records that the
prehistoric caves where the paintings were found were restricted for children.
Then, the visual art educated the children in hunting even before their first hunting
ride. The first humans were hunter-gatherers and they depended on hunting. So,
enculturation in hunting, which is from our perspectives a form of violence, was
necessary especially for males children who were expected to become the next
generation of hunters in the smaller or bigger social groups, that we name in
some cases bands.
However, during the Neolithic, the period of agricultural-stockbreeding
societies in many regions in Europe, the anthropomorphic and zoomorphic
figurines were very popular, especially in Southeast Europe (Bailey 2005). Most
impressive in the anthropomorphic figurines are the presentations of quietness
and balanced emotions. As the cave paintings, these figurines have multilayered
semantics (Bailey 2005), but many of them were part of the household inventory in
the everydayness if people. My understanding is that this quietness of the figurines
was purposeful and functioned as an enculturational means for balancing of
emotions in the household and educating the children in stable positive and non-
aggressive emotions.
Education and enculturation in violence through non-violence is probably the most
perspective method since according to the specialists, there is “causal connection
between media violence and aggressive behavior in some children” (Cook et al.
2000). There is most recent research on the brain that confirms this statement and
the extensive viewing of TV aggression “may result in a large number of
aggressive scripts stored in long-term memory in the posterior cingulate, which
facilitates rapid recall of aggressive scenes that serve as a guide for overt social
behavior” (Murray et al. 2006).
So, trying to answer the question What should be done to improve children’s
television viewing? I see two sides: the side of the media industry and the side of
parents, children and society. The violence increases the interest of children in TV
but if such type of media has been viewing in families in which there are no
violence behavior, most probably the children would not be interested if parents
explain them and give them non-violence examples as contrasting the violence. If
children live in families in which the relationships include elements of violence, the
TV may increase the side effect of the violence media entertainment.
To resolve the problem of the positive development if children and decreasing of
the violence in our society, the media industry should work together with
psychologists and social workers that may result in a compromise and even in
some very positive results. Possibly good example for how violence had been
used just to catch the attentions of the children but was followed by funny and
really entertaining moments is the movie “Ghost ship”. It looks to me this is a way
to go, since the children see at the beginning a culmination and may watch the
whole movie either involved in the funny side of the movie, or waiting for the
violence culmination the movies started with.
The human society depends on the human self-awareness. The violence is not
immanent for humans, but was a part of the human social practices from the
beginning of the human history. So, the people keep in themselves and have been
reproducing a huge historical capital of violence. To develop a non-violent society
we need to embody humanity in any cell of the human society. If this objective
becomes a goal of every person on this world, who knows: the violence may
disappear not only form the children’s TV entertainment viewing, but also from the
whole human society.
Bailey, D.W. (2005). Prehistoric figurines. London & New York : Routledge.
Cook, Donald E., Kestenbaum, Clarice, Honaker, L. Michael and Anderson, E.
Ratcliffe et al. (2000). Joint Statement on the Impact of Entertainment Violence on
Children Congressional Public Health Summit July 26, 2000. http://www.aap.
org/advocacy/releases/jstmtevc.htm
Encyclopedia of Irish and World Art. http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/sitemap-world-
art.htm
Murray, John P., Liotti, Mario, Ingmundson, Paul T., Mayberg, Helen S. Pu,
Yonglin, Zamarripa, Frank, Liu, Yijun, Waldorff, Marty G., Gao, Jia-Hong and Fox,
Peter T. (2006). Children's brain activations while viewing televised violence
revealed by fMRI. Media psychology 8, 1, 25-37.
Student’s website: http://www.iianthropology.org/psychology_childrenviolence.html
TV violence viewing transiently recruits a network of brain regions involved in the
regulation of emotion, arousal and attention, episodic memory encoding and
retrieval, and motor programming. (Murray et al. 2006)
We do not have a lot of memory moments in our brain from our childhood. But
there are some that we like to recall or they just come in our mind time by time.
One of my favorites is about when being abt 5 years old we liked to have played the
game, which was popular in Bulgaria – “partizani and apashi” . Within the years I
have been referring to this fragment in my memory to understand my
independence and the “maleness” in myself. I really liked this game, because I
lived in a small village with a crossing river and very narrow valley, surrounded by
mountains. So, the partizani with wooden guns early in the morning went to the
forest on the one side of the river, and the apashi – on the other. I still
psychologically have the feeling of the fear from my childhood in my mind “What
would happen?” but do not have any memory about any fighting. Probably both
groups never found each other.
It was about 1965, so just before and at the beginning of the first TV programs
in Bulgaria. Then, there was no TV influence, but we watched at that time many
Russian films about the Second World War and it was a tradition at least one a
week my grandfather or grandmother to have brought me to watch a movie. I think
they were only Russian films that I obviously accepted as Bulgarians, since I
thought “konets” (The end”) was a Bulgarian word. At that time I even lived with my
grandparents in one and the same apartment together with the family of Ivan
Okovski, who was the film operator there.
The game of “partizani” and apashi” was only one of many that we played
there. And I don’t think it was a bad game – it was more like an interaction with the
nature and I even now think that probably instead playing the game at certain
moment had switched to have been gathering forest flowers like wild violets. I had
such a wonderful childhood, that one of the reasons not to have my own children
today was that I have never made my life later to be able to provide my eventual
children with the childhood I had. I still believe that intensively interacting with the
nature is the best childhood. I also I think that if my brain time by time
demonstrates smartness if any, the main reason is that the first 6 years my food
did not come by stores like Walmart and Albertson’s but from our own garden and
our one farm – always fresh and healthy. My grandmother and grandfather were
dedicated to me to have felt healthy and happy as a child.
So, from my perspectives, it is not just a question of direct influence of the
violence entertainment on the children. The negative influence today of the violence
entertainment is a result of the general multiscale cultural environment, which in
many cases is not very healthy for the children. In this environemnt the violence
entertainment additionally overwhelms the children with direct or indirect negative
emotions. The reproduction of what we have seen is a complex process and we
even never know when certain experience will influence our current social
practices.
To demonstrate the complexity of the problem I will turn to the following
question: Do we have violence in our everydayness? The answer is yes. Then the
next question comes: Should we educate the children in violence? I believe so.
However, the question that we still cannot answer is what is the best means to
educate them in violence.
If you turn to the beginning of the human history, there are not many records of
violence within the visual art. Nevertheless, the cave painting with hunting scenes
(Encyclopedia) that include killing of animals can be accepted as a record about
violence. They have multilayered semantics, but for our topic we can point to the
fact that they were seen by the children. We do not have any records that the
prehistoric caves where the paintings were found were restricted for children.
Then, the visual art educated the children in hunting even before their first hunting
ride. The first humans were hunter-gatherers and they depended on hunting. So,
enculturation in hunting, which is from our perspectives a form of violence, was
necessary especially for males children who were expected to become the next
generation of hunters in the smaller or bigger social groups, that we name in
some cases bands.
However, during the Neolithic, the period of agricultural-stockbreeding
societies in many regions in Europe, the anthropomorphic and zoomorphic
figurines were very popular, especially in Southeast Europe (Bailey 2005). Most
impressive in the anthropomorphic figurines are the presentations of quietness
and balanced emotions. As the cave paintings, these figurines have multilayered
semantics (Bailey 2005), but many of them were part of the household inventory in
the everydayness if people. My understanding is that this quietness of the figurines
was purposeful and functioned as an enculturational means for balancing of
emotions in the household and educating the children in stable positive and non-
aggressive emotions.
Education and enculturation in violence through non-violence is probably the most
perspective method since according to the specialists, there is “causal connection
between media violence and aggressive behavior in some children” (Cook et al.
2000). There is most recent research on the brain that confirms this statement and
the extensive viewing of TV aggression “may result in a large number of
aggressive scripts stored in long-term memory in the posterior cingulate, which
facilitates rapid recall of aggressive scenes that serve as a guide for overt social
behavior” (Murray et al. 2006).
So, trying to answer the question What should be done to improve children’s
television viewing? I see two sides: the side of the media industry and the side of
parents, children and society. The violence increases the interest of children in TV
but if such type of media has been viewing in families in which there are no
violence behavior, most probably the children would not be interested if parents
explain them and give them non-violence examples as contrasting the violence. If
children live in families in which the relationships include elements of violence, the
TV may increase the side effect of the violence media entertainment.
To resolve the problem of the positive development if children and decreasing of
the violence in our society, the media industry should work together with
psychologists and social workers that may result in a compromise and even in
some very positive results. Possibly good example for how violence had been
used just to catch the attentions of the children but was followed by funny and
really entertaining moments is the movie “Ghost ship”. It looks to me this is a way
to go, since the children see at the beginning a culmination and may watch the
whole movie either involved in the funny side of the movie, or waiting for the
violence culmination the movies started with.
The human society depends on the human self-awareness. The violence is not
immanent for humans, but was a part of the human social practices from the
beginning of the human history. So, the people keep in themselves and have been
reproducing a huge historical capital of violence. To develop a non-violent society
we need to embody humanity in any cell of the human society. If this objective
becomes a goal of every person on this world, who knows: the violence may
disappear not only form the children’s TV entertainment viewing, but also from the
whole human society.
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |