Media's Negative Impact on Children and Adolescents

Media’s Negative Impact on Children and Adolescents

Sarah Foyer

ENG/102

January 17, 2010

Jeanne Williams

Media’s Negative Impact on Children and Adolescents

      Today’s media is unlike any other before; it just keeps growing better and better. There is so much information and so many different ways to acquire the information on anything that one would want to know. There is television, newspapers, magazines, internet, and many more. The only question that draws to my mind is; with everything that is available is it hurting our children and adolescents? Today’s media may not be the only reason for today’s children acting more violent, their obsession with sex and a cause of insecurity, but it is an immense cause.

    The media today is extremely essential in society no doubt. It provides us information on any subject or matter. We receive information on subjects like the weather, local, and worldwide news, to entertainment. With the positives of the media outweighing the negative aspects people may think that the media is not hurting today’s children and adolescents, but the truth in many people’s opinion is that the negative can be very detrimental. To see how detrimental the media truly can be on children, one needs to examine just how much children and adolescents are exposed to it.

    Today’s children ranging from infants to 17 become exposed to an enormous amount of media and in most opinions much more than ever before. In today’s society, “the average American child spends three to five hours a day watching television” (Adams, 2008 para.2). If one really stops to think about that statistic, it seems somewhat absurd. In most cases children are in school anywhere from four to eight hours a day by the time that they get to and from and nowadays “the average youth will spend 900 hours a year in school and 1,500 hours of watching TV” (Adams, 2008 para.5). This statistic is proving how much children and adolescents are exposed to...