Television: Positive or Negative Effect on Children?

Does television have a positive or negative effect on children?
Next to the Internet, television is one of the most powerful mediums of communication in the world today. With most households owning at least one, some families even owning up to four televisions. It has been said that television can have quite a negative effect on children with many programmes having a bad influence on the youngsters. These programmes can also affect their education as well as their physical ability. Although it can be argued that television does in fact have a positive effect on children, with television being one of the main sources for children to gather information whether it’s the news or the weather. Television can also have huge benefits on children as it can increase their education and their abilities, being the obvious one, it can be extremely entertaining for children. I for one agree, I think television has a positive effect on children.
Television can be an extremely bad influence on children today with the daily amount of television watched every day increasingly drastically. It was surveyed that in 2000, the average household that had children in them had at least 2.8 televisions, which would be on at least seven hours and forty minutes a day. Another was done for the year 2003; it discovered that children as young as six months old were watching on average at least one hour of television but also forty minutes of film. They also found out that children aged three to eleven watched a minimum of three hours. Television can also have a negative effect on children as programmes increase children’s emotions, from happy to intense. Children are often left unaccompanied when watching television which results in them being able to watch what they please, some even left watching violent programmes which then leave a long lasting impact in the child’s mind which usually cannot be erased. A study showed that the average child see’s up to 12,000 acts of violence on...