Aggression in children's media

Children learn from observing others; this is a well respected behavourist viewpoint, so therefore when making a media text for a child audience, you must take into consideration everything that happens in your narrative and what your character represents, to ensure that they are not displaying any negative behaviours that the child could be affected by.

If you consider some of the theories I have previously looked at (see post "Some definitions") then here are some possible examples of how agressove/violent acts could affect a child viewer.


- Hyperdermic syringe: The child will view the piece and not question anything about it, presuming life is like this.

- Cultivation theory: Child sees a violent act commited on television by a bald headed man and then assumes all bald headed men will be violent.

- Desensitisation: Child sees violence in a media text and assumes it's normal becomes desensitised to the shock of violence.

- Copycat theory: Child sees aggressive behaviour and copys it themself.

- Reception theory: One child viewer could be scared by a certain character and their actions, yet another child could view the same text and could take a liking to this certain character.

- Ethnography: You have to try and grasp/remember what is scary for a child that age, because to us as young adults most things aren't scary, however a child of a TA age rang (1-4) could be easily scared by something we view as totally normal/fine.


I will now give some examples of cases where children have been affected by violence and aggression in media texts.

The Academy of Pediatrics says “More than one thousand scientific studies and reviews conclude that significant exposure to media violence increases the risk of aggressive behavior in certain children, desensitizes them to violence and makes them believe that the world is a ‘meaner and scarier’ place than it is.” Many psychologists believe that childre have a 'critical period' for learning, and in this time they are most impressionable - think of the child as a sponge during this time; they are likely to soak up most academic knowledge and general life skills/behaviours in this time period compared to any other time period in their life. If during this time children begin to think that this type of violence is normal behavior these thoughts are often difficult to change later on in life. (This is supported by studies into children who have experienced/witnessed domestic violence often becoming offenders of victims themselves because they believe violence is the 'norm'.)

Psychology also makes us aware to the types of 'conditioning' that are happening to these child viewers. Classical conditioning, operant conditioning and social learning theory.

Classical conditioning: Think of this as forcing an association between one thing and something else. (Everybody knows the experiment about Pavlov ringing a bell when he fed his dogs to make them salivate; he carried on doing this until he could ring the bell, but produce no food, and they would still salivate.) Putting it into context for children's media would be they see a conflict happen and it always gets resovled with violence. The child would then associate the recognition of conflict with the aggressive/violent act and maybe apply this to any conflict they had in life.

Operant conditioning: If a child for example swore, some people would react by telling them off - this being a negative consequence of the action of swearing and the child would be less likely to do it again (as they wouldn't want to recieve the negative consequence again). However some people may laugh if the child swore. Now, to a child, making people laugh is a reward so the child would be more likely to repeat the swearing action to gain the positive response of laughter. Applying this to children's media; if a child saw this scenario happening on television, they would maybe immitate it to try and gain the positive reaction.

Social Learning Theory: This says that children learn from their interactions with others. So a child may view another person on television being violent/aggressive and learn from that and repeat the action themself.


One, terrible event which brought about this massive concern of violence in children's media was the Columbine incident. The two boys (both of whom played hours of violent video games) had secure and supportive home lives, yet still were influenced enough by the media to commit such a hideous act of violence. There was also a similar case in Kentucky where a young boy, Micheal Carneal entered his school and shot and killed some of his classmates. He shot 9 bullets in a 10second period. 8 of those shots were hits, with 3 being head shots and 3 being neck. This accuracy and precision of shot is WAY above the standard of the US army expert marksmen. This child had never fired a pistol in all his life, but becuase of the hours he spent on violent video games, he became an expert at it. I mean, you can't really blame the poor lad, when on these games you get rewarded with more points for 'head shots'.

If parents/guargians are worried about their child experience violent media and copying from it, then there are certain steps they should take, such as helping them chose age appropriate programmes to watch and watching programmes with them incase any issues do arise you will be able to talk abou them.