When Television teaches your kids

By Azys Syaiful Anwar

Television is an audio visual media which provides some program, such us entertainments and news. In recent years, there are a lot of TV channels which compete to get the viewers attention by presenting more entertainments rather than informative and educative program.  As a result, it successfully becomes the first choice of free home entertainment and may become your children favorite. Addicted to the television programs, children may become passive and having less spirit to do their activities. They tend to choose to stay watching their favorite TV programs in their house.

Naturally, children have higher desire to play and doing other fun activities to support their development in many aspects, especially for their social, education and mentality development. Children who have amazing ability in learning can be easily influenced by TV. However, in my opinion, TV gives more negatives rather than positive effects for the children. There are some implicit values taught by television that can be discussed here. They are violence and hedonism. Those two negatives values mostly dominate some television program in Indonesia.

Some years ago, there was a full body contact entertainment wrestling broadcasted by a famous TV Channel in Indonesia. Although it was broadcasted on the late night, some children enthusiastically waited that wrestling show. They enjoy watching it and even try to imitate their favorite wrestler action that may result in children violence. Besides, children may learn how to slap their friend from comedy TV program. According to me, there are some comedians who only use rude words even doing rude behavior, such as mocking and slapping their partner. It makes sense if your children often watching such comedy program becoming rude. Violence behavior is not only taught in some adult program, it also can be found in some cartoon programs. The clearest example is a cartoon which employs a cat and a mouse as the actors. This cartoon only tells about the effort of a cat to catch a mouse using many method that may including, hitting, slapping, trapping and many other rude ways. You can also read my former post about violence here Violence in School

The next lesson that children obtain is hedonism. Hedonism is a theory which placed pleasure as the aim of life. As I can see in some teenage series or other TV series, Hedonism is often implicitly conveyed through the story of the TV series. The antagonist cast is the perfect model of hedonism. Most of TV series story tell us about many things related to the fight of getting inheritance. It seems that money here placed as the first priority of live. Moreover, in some teenage TV series, we can see many scenes about parties or wasting money for shopping. Besides, some teenage series also teach children to dress unusual known as fashionable style. In the school scenes, many students wear untidy uniform and they proud of that style. This lifestyle influences children or teenage to do the same. They are demanded to stay update with the recent development. They may divert the school fee money given by their parents only to buy some update body accessories, update gadget or the more serious case is buying drugs.

Violence and hedonism is two example of the negative TV influence. However, it is possible if there are found any other negative value of Television. Since parents have the most important role of educating children, parents need to wisely guide their kids when they watch TV. Parents also have to give support to their children if they have any other activities outside of school program that may reduce their children in consuming the TV program.