The Impact of Watching Television on Children Essay

Watching television is steadily evolving into the most preferred pastime, irrespective of viewers’ age and gender. However, despite its unlimited entertaining and informatory opportunities, viewing television entails both positive and negative outcomes. Specifically, this activity is detrimental to language development in young children.

Watching Television and Language Development

Currently, television greatly influences the formation of children since their birth (Pagani, Fitzpatrick, Barnett & Dubow, 2010, p. 426). Moreover, “The average amount of screen time increases with age” (Duch, Fisher, Ensari & Harrington, 2013). Numerous research studies indicate that enormous children’s exposure to computer games, TV-based entertainment, playing programs, and television reduces their level of critical consciousness (Christakis et al., 2009; Tomopoulos et al., 2010). Moreover, such activities change their perception of the world, transform moral and ethical values, deteriorate their abilities to analyze and synthesize information, and retard language development (Christakis et al., 2009; Tomopoulos et al., 2010; Duch et al., 2013). In spite of the presence of insightful and educational programs, television does not promote sustained interest to the world, other people, diverse phenomena, and so forth. It evokes natural curiosity, which is immediately satisfied with superficial, distorted, or even completely incorrect information. The inner world of young children is still in its infancy; everything that they receive from communication and activities shared with adults plays a significant role in shaping their identity (Pempek, Kirkorian & Anderson, 2014). Uncontrolled consumption of media information characterized by poor quality and inappropriate content prevents the formation of speech and articulation; it does not provide children with incentives necessary for the formation of motor skills and senses. Those who watch television too often are at a great risk of remaining without knowledge of the world. They experience difficulties in distinguishing reality from fiction, acquiring new knowledge, reading, and writing. Moreover, they are sometimes characterized by increased anxiety in conjunction with spontaneous aggression.

In accordance with recent research studies, such as those by Christakis et al. (2009), Pagani et al. (2010), Duch et al. (2013), Pempek et al. (2014), frequent and long-term television viewing has multiple negative effects, replacing concrete sensual experience and hindering the development of language skills in young children. A child’s early involvement in watching television adversely affects one’s development, significantly lowers curiosity, and makes one passive (Pagani et al., 2010, p. 426). Children learn to speak by communicating with people not television. Their developing brain does not handle television speech with the same intensity as a conversation with a living person. Successful language development depends on a child’s psychophysical health, including one’s state of higher nervous activity, mental processes (attention, memory, imagination, and thinking), as well as physical (somatic) state. Prolonged TV viewing is fraught with slower development of language, depletes vocabulary, worsens figurative speech, and decreases abilities to accurately articulate thoughts.

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In addition, watching television is associated with a sedentary lifestyle, which potentially leads to overweight, obesity, and other disorders. Furthermore, when a person utters words, all one’s body is involved in the process of speaking, making certain micromotions. Engaging one’s entire being (literally and figuratively) in the process of communication, an infant learns to speak at the level of consciousness, uttering various imitative sounds: cooing, babbling, to list a few. Before he or she promotes one’s first word, a baby trains the muscles of his body and face and learns to coordinate more than a hundred of muscles involved in articulation, focusing on adults. On the contrary, when he or she hears speech from TV loudspeakers, his or her body does not react to sounds. In the process of young children’s language development, live communication and interactions with family members cannot be substituted with watching television.
During viewing television, children’s mentality is more directed towards visualization than verbalization (Christakis et al., 2009). Children watch TV silently; they do not communicate with others or practice speaking. Moreover, viewing telev
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