Assume, for this question, that I'm talking purely about first-world children and TV and cinema rather than, say, children in war-zones or computer games or the internet.
It seems to be taken as read that there are things that children should be protected from in the media. I can't, however, find any scientific studies which can give me a rationale for this. I know there have been studies which have demonstrated short-term hypodermic effects from media violence with children being shown violent cartoons and then acting violently against dummies afterwards, but evidence of long-term effects seem to be as ephemeral as it is in any other media effects study.
With the nature of such studies, the many number of factors which will naturally influence behaviour and development, and the ethical considerations of doing any study on human beings in general and children in particular, I wonder whether it would even be possible to demonstrate the harm such media is presumed to cause.
Again, I can find any number of "common sense" arguments from both sides - the "would you want your child to receive their sex education from pornography?" or "my mate watched The Texas Chain Saw Massacre obsessively when he was 4 and turned out fine" (the latter of those actually being true for someone I know) - and I can come to what I consider reasonable conclusions on my own (it seems likely to me that repeated exposure to material that is deemed unsuitable is probably not a good thing for a developing brain, that occasional exposure will probably cause no harm, but that there may be certain things which certain children find extremely traumatic even just the once, all of the above being true to a greater or lesser degree depending a great deal on the specifics of the media and the child), but none of this is actual scientific evidence. Pretty much all the material I can find simply assumes that censorship for children is a good thing.
Does anything like this exist? Not necessarily a study of the kind I mentioned above - a well-conducted study demonstrating children developing PTSD due to things they have viewed could be good evidence, again depending on the specifics - but just something more evidential than an assumption.
It seems to be taken as read that there are things that children should be protected from in the media. I can't, however, find any scientific studies which can give me a rationale for this. I know there have been studies which have demonstrated short-term hypodermic effects from media violence with children being shown violent cartoons and then acting violently against dummies afterwards, but evidence of long-term effects seem to be as ephemeral as it is in any other media effects study.
With the nature of such studies, the many number of factors which will naturally influence behaviour and development, and the ethical considerations of doing any study on human beings in general and children in particular, I wonder whether it would even be possible to demonstrate the harm such media is presumed to cause.
Again, I can find any number of "common sense" arguments from both sides - the "would you want your child to receive their sex education from pornography?" or "my mate watched The Texas Chain Saw Massacre obsessively when he was 4 and turned out fine" (the latter of those actually being true for someone I know) - and I can come to what I consider reasonable conclusions on my own (it seems likely to me that repeated exposure to material that is deemed unsuitable is probably not a good thing for a developing brain, that occasional exposure will probably cause no harm, but that there may be certain things which certain children find extremely traumatic even just the once, all of the above being true to a greater or lesser degree depending a great deal on the specifics of the media and the child), but none of this is actual scientific evidence. Pretty much all the material I can find simply assumes that censorship for children is a good thing.
Does anything like this exist? Not necessarily a study of the kind I mentioned above - a well-conducted study demonstrating children developing PTSD due to things they have viewed could be good evidence, again depending on the specifics - but just something more evidential than an assumption.
via JREF Forum http://ift.tt/1nQ5DO5
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