1. Mr. Brincefield English 114 January 27, 2010 I want to be a Criminal when I grow up… There was a time when role-playing in ones childhood, actually involved a role or character worth imitating. Boys wanted to be the hero - not the villain- and would take turns playing the side-kick. Girls on the other hand, would pretend to be the ideal woman – a wife, a mother, a school teacher; and the generation of grandparents provided plenty of good examples. However in today’s world of multi-media craze, imagination has entered the virtual reality twilight zone. Aggression is justified by a stand in authority figure, an alien, or other fictitious monsters. A quote from the lyrics of the song, Where Is The Love, performed by Black Eyed Peas -“I feel the weight of the world on my shoulder, As I'm getting older y'all people get colder, Most of us only care about money makin, Selfishness got us followin the wrong direction, Wrong information always shown by the media, Negative images is the main criteria, Infecting their young minds faster than bacteria, Kids wanna act like what the see in the cinema”. It is unquestionable that children act out what they see, it is a learning process that is as old as time itself. Animals by nature learn how to defend themselves, scourge for food, seek safety by observing the habits of their parents. Children are observant if nothing else. Depending on their environment and home life, they may or may not react to harsh words, disturbing images, and intimidating body language. Parents need to be the first filter of censorship, they know their children the best – or they should. With all the FCC ratings, and how they score any television program, there is no guarantee that anyone would agree with the words, and dialogue of the shows content. When exploring what is right and wrong, it is a shot in the dark, and its grounds for mass hysteria – stepping over the lines of our government and constitutional rights of speech and press. Video games are an expensive babysitter in the long run. Ask the parent of a 5th grade boy, who threatened to blow up the school after a teacher suspended him for drawing the characters of the video game he had played - Resident Evil. He was suspended for three days for communicating threats, and caused the parents to miss work, which led to other problems. Children- and to be perfectly honest, adults too - don’t always have the discernment necessary to distinguish who is in the wrong. They get angry, they want to react and rebel. Video games fill time, they are full of excitement, action, and can make the inferior feel superior. Children watch on average three to four hours of television a day, whether it’s a particular channel out of hundreds, or a movie on dvd. The images and actions seen, are processed by the mind, they are stored by default like a good word processing program on a computer. Children are at risk for aggressive behavior as adults when exposed to real life situations perceived on shows which provide unrealistic results. A portion of an article published in March of 2003 on The American Psychologist Association website: “Psychologists of the University of Michigan undertook the study as a follow-up of a 1977 longitudinal study of 557 children, ages 6 - 10, growing up in the Chicago area. In that study, children identified which violent TV shows they watched most, whether they identified with the aggressive characters and whether they thought the violent situations were realistic. Some examples of shows rated as very violent were Starsky and Hutch, The Six Million Dollar Man and Roadrunner cartoons. The current study re-surveyed 329 of the original boys and girls, now in their early 20s. The participants asked about their favorite TV programs as adults and about their aggressive behaviors. The participants' spouses or friends were also interviewed and were asked to rate the participant's frequency of engaging in aggressive behavior. The researchers also obtained data on the participants from state archives, which included criminal conviction records and moving traffic violations. Results show that men who were high TV-violence viewers as children were significantly more likely to have pushed, grabbed or shoved their spouses, to have responded to an insult by shoving a person, to have been convicted of a crime and to have committed a moving traffic violation. Such men, for example, had been convicted of crimes at over three times the rate of other men. Women who were high TV-violence viewers as children were more likely to have thrown something at their spouses, to have responded to someone who made them mad by shoving, punching, beating or choking the person, to have committed some type of criminal act, and to have committed a moving traffic violation. Such women, for example, reported having punched, beaten or choked another adult at over four times the rate of other women.” http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2003/03/media-violence.aspx Longitudinal Relations Between Children’s Exposure to TV Violence and Their Aggressive and Violent Behavior in Young Adulthood: 1977–1992 L. Rowell Huesmann, Jessica Moise-Titus, Cheryl-Lynn Podolski, and Leonard D. Eron University of Michigan http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/dev-392201.pdf The results are frightening. Yet, we have little to compare to the opposite. Only a few very conservative families have little or no exposure to media. People with conservative values, who instill these in their child rearing, often home-school their children as well, and that reduces the interaction and relationships with peers, and eliminates - for the most part – a lot of guilt trips for these parents. The majority of American homes have some source of media, and a good percentage of these homes have families with small children. From the evidence given, it seems that a child has better chances of growing up and having the negative characteristics of The Hulk, and less chances of saving his family from himself, much less the world from an evil invasion.