Negative impact of cartoon shows on children (Age: 5-7)

Introduction

Watching cartoons has become one of the primary actions to many children these

days. Too many children are watching too much cartoons and some of the materials can

make them violent and addictive. Typically, children begin watching cartoons on television

at an early age of six months, and by the age two or three children become enthusiastic

viewers. Statistics indicate that children watch up to 30 hours of television each week,

almost equivalent to the time spent in a full-time job. Among the TV shows, children have a

special attraction to cartoons. Children watching too much cartoons on television are more

likely to have mental and emotional problems, along with brain and eye injuries and

unexpectedly the risk of a physical problem increases. Sometimes the material of the

cartoons is not appropriate for their age group. Some cartoons represent violent actions

involving animated characters and situations. High level of violence in cartoons can make

children more aggressive. It is because children tend to mimic the negative behavior they

see on cartoons. The children who watched the violent cartoons, were more likely to hit

their playmates, argue, disobey class rules, leave tasks unfinished, and were less willing to

wait for things than those children who watched nonviolent programs. Besides, some

cartoons are also displaying false sense of reality upon children.

Along with the behavioral effects, watching cartoons for long time also leave some

physiological symptoms. As for the brain, there is scientific evidence that too much

television can be detrimental to children. The April 2004 issue of the medical journal

Pediatrics published a study done by Children’s Hospital and Regional Medical Center of

Seattle, Washington. The study revealed that children who watched three to four hours of

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television daily had a 30 to 40 percent greater risk of developing attention deficit disorder

than children who did not watch television. While no specific program is directly

responsible, Dr. Dimitri Christakis, leader of the study, speculates that the speed of the

images displayed could affect children’s brains (Today’s Chiropractic, 2004).

The other problem is that the eyes get bad. Adams, Cecil (1992, July 24) claimed that

watching television is not a danger to the eyes, as long as children watch in the right

conditions. Most people think that just watching cartoons on television is very dangerous to

the eyes, but if the room is quite bright and children sit far from the television, it will not

damage their eyes, but rather will result in eye fatigue.

Fantasy is the main content of cartoons and in fact, every human being has his or her

own secret fantasy world. So, fantasies are only harmful when they are giving a wrong

message, especially to the juvenile minds of kids. Violence is not funny and it is not harmless

so the children needs help to develop a sense of consequence of those acts which they saw

the cartoon characters doing.

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 Negative impact of cartoon shows on children (Age: 5-7)

Background

Children enjoy watching cartoons. Nevertheless, most parents do not let their

children watch cartoons too much because they get worried about the effects of cartoons

on their children. First of all, if their children watch cartoons too much, the children’s eyes

would get worse, and they may also lose their attention span. Secondly, parents are worried

about mental and emotional problems with their children, which could come from watching

violent cartoons. The last problem is that children most often imitate what they see on

television. These three reasons are why every parent should control their children with

watching cartoons too much on TV.

A cartoon is several forms of art, with varied meanings that evolved from one to

another. Cartoon is a main source of entertainment for children. Children keenly observe

what cartoons' actions. Round the clock cartoons are on air on Cartoon Network. Because of

this channel, we can see barren playgrounds, children's sloppy attitude towards studies.

They have no time for the healthy activities. Children watch cartoons for entertainment.

They prefer those cartoons which are understandable in terms of language.

Cartoons have existed on broadcast television for about seven decades. Many of the

cartoon characters that children are most familiar with are Bugs Bunny, Ben 10, Tom and

jerry, He-man, Captain planet, Daffy Duck, and Popeye. From the last five to six years

Dragon ball z, Pokemon, Naruto, Thundercats, Final fantasy etc has become much popular

and attractive among children. These cartoons contain more violent content than the

cartoons of earlier decades. According to Butler, Jeremy (2010), scenes in cartoons that

were considered appropriate for a general audience in the 1940s are not thought to be too
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brutal for today’s educated children. There is no uncertainty that cartoon violence affects

children in some way.

Animated shows aimed at youngsters often have more brutality than programmes

broadcast for general audiences. Children copied and identified with fantasy characters just

as much as they would with screen actors. “The U.S. psychologists quizzed 95 girls aged ten

and 11 about their favorite TV shows, rating them for violent content and verbal and

indirect aggression. … found that output aimed at children as young as seven, which

included a number of cartoons had the highest levels of violence.” (Clark, Laura. “Cartoon

violence makes children more aggressive”). So we need to consider the ways in which

children process information, the amount of mental effort they invest, and their own life

experience to gain an understanding of how television violence affects children.

Studies by George Gerbner, Ph.D., at the University of Pennsylvania, have shown

that children's TV shows contain about 20 violent acts each hour and also that children who

watch a lot of television are more likely to think that the world is a mean and dangerous

place. Although violence presented as real appears to promote aggression more in adults

than violence described as fictional, fictional violence also seems to make aggression more

likely than programming without violent content (Atkin, 1983).

Psychological research has shown three major effects of seeing violence on television:

 Children may become less sensitive to the pain and suffering of others

 Children may be more fearful of the world around them

 Children may be more likely to behave in aggressive or harmful ways toward others.

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 Negative impact of cartoon shows on children (Age: 5-7)

Today in many children’s cartoon’s we see cartoon characters jumping, diving, and

falling from very high heights, then landing without being harmed. Parents seem to be

happy with this as long as the cartoon doesn’t promote adult or any kind of violent

content. Some cartoons like Bugs Bunny show that they shoot each other. But, are these

types of cartoon really ok for your children to watch? These sorts of cartoons are displaying

false sense of reality upon children. Being able to fall off a tall cliff or being shot with a gun

in the face and walking from these incidents with barely a scratch. At a young age, this

false sense of reality can really affect them.

Josephson, Wendy (2010), observed that elementary school age (ages six to eleven)

is considered a critical period for understanding the effects of television on aggression. At

this stage, children develop the attention span and cognitive ability to follow continuous

plots, to make inferences about implicit content, and to recognize motivations and

consequences to characters' actions. However, they are also investing increasingly less

mental effort overall in their viewing and it is mental effort that determines whether

children will process television information deeply or merely react to it in an unfocused,

superficial way.

Today’s children tend to spend less time on physical activities and study. This is

because they often spend too much time on watching cartoons. In Japan, the availability of

TV accompanied a decline in both time spend on homework and reading skills (Furu, 1962).

This avoidance of physical activities can increase the rate of obesity among the children.

Besides, it also has lessened the practice of their intellectual ability. Parents should be

concerned about how many hours their children are spending on watching cartoons.
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 Negative impact of cartoon shows on children (Age: 5-7)

Research Questions

In the research paper I have tried to find out the impacts of watching cartoons based on

observing the children. My research addressed the following questions:

 What kind of cartoon character did you like?

 How many hours you used to spend every day on watching cartoon?

 Do you still spend that much time for watching cartoons?

 Have you ever wanted to be cartoon character you used to like?

 Did you like the cartoons that contained fighting or violent material?

 Do you think those cartoon shows have ever made you think to do something

violent?

 Did you have headache or stress for watching cartoons for long time?

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 Negative impact of cartoon shows on children (Age: 5-7)

Hypothesis

Cartoon shows have great impact on a child’s mind. It can create temporary physical and

mental problems. Children, watching television for a long time, often have headache and

eye ache. Besides the cartoons those are being showed in television today, contains more

violent material. Sometimes children spend too much time in watching cartoon than any

other activity. That can harm their study and lessen intellectual capability.

Methodology

This study was planned to identify the impact of cartoons on children. The primary

research is based on the negative impacts of cartoons on the childhood of some

undergraduate students. I have chosen twenty undergraduate students of North South

University to conduct the primary research. The purpose was to collect their experience and

prove how badly cartoons can harm the children based on their response to my questions. I

have provided a questioner based on my assumptions to get their responses against my

assumptions.

I have also read out few online articles and journal to do my secondary research. I

have found some articles on the impacts on cartoons done by physiologists who tried to

identify the behavioral impacts on the children. Most of the articles refers that cartoons are

containing more violent contents these days. For which children may suffer from behavioral

aggression.

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 Negative impact of cartoon shows on children (Age: 5-7)

Data presentation and analysis

Hours spent on watching cartoon

14

12

10

6 12 12
10
4
6
2

0
2 Hours 4 Hours More thatn 6 hours Do not remember

Children are watching too mutch cartoon these days. They used to sped a large

portion of a day to watch cartoon. Most of the children used to spend at least four hours on

watching cartoons. Besides the graph shows that twelve among the fourty(30 percent)

children used to spend more than six hours. This is of course an alarming rate of spending

time on watching cartoons. It may have lead them to do less physical works. There are also

12 children whose parents do not remember how much time their children spent on

watching cartoons. They may have spent too much to remember or not so much fond of

cartoons. The response is higher of spendig four or more hours on watching cartoons.

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 Negative impact of cartoon shows on children (Age: 5-7)

Favorite types of cartoon character

16

14

12

10

8
14
6
10 10
4
6
2

0
Fighter Super Hero Funny No Specific Type

Among the fourty respondents, we see that fourteen children(35 percent) watch

super hero character. They might have a false sense of reality that they can do anything

without getting any harm. There are ten respondents(25percent) who liked fighter

character. Both super hero and fighter character can create false sense of reality at their

early age. A very little response found on the funny characters. There are ten respondents

who were not fond of any specific type of characters. We can see that more than half of the

responses were on fighter and super hero characters which might have lead them being

violent.

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Favorite cartoon show

7.50%

Captain Planet
45% Tom & Jerry
32.50%
Ben 10
Doraemon

15%

Among the cartoon shows fourty five percent respondents watch Doraemon and 33

percent watch tom & jerry which is a funny cartoon show and another twenty two percent

children watch captain planet and Ben 10. Here we can see that more than half of the

respondents used to watch funny cartoons. But in the previous graph, we saw that almost

half of the respondents used to like super hero and fighter character. Here fighter character

Capten planet has 7 percent respondentss. Ben 10, a super hero type cartoon has only

fifteen percent respondent. Tom and jerry cartoon often show that they are jumping from

higher places and throwing stuffs to each other. This can be harmful for children if they try

to follow those cartoons.

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Typrs of children used to be

5%
25%

Quite
45% Angry Child
Creative
25%
Stubborn

From the graph we can see that 45 percent of the respondents are creative. Among

them twenty five percent are quite and another twenty five percent are angry child. This

percentage represents that cartoons might make children creative. Children who used to

watch much more violent material on cartoon used to stubborn most of the case. But from

the survey I found that only five percent who used to be stubborn. Either he used to spent

more time on watching cartoons that contained violent material or for other reason except

cartoons.

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Physical problem due to watching cartoon for

a long time
24
25

20

15
10
10

5 2 2 2

0
Headache Eye ache Stress Migraine None of the
above

The graph shows that among fourty children, twenty four of them have not face any

kind of physical problems for watching cartoons for long time. But ten of them said that

they face some eye problem. A very few children face headache, stress or migraine type

problem. It represents that watching cartoon for long do have a very little impact on

children. Among the impacts eye ache is the more common problem faced bye the

respondents.

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Opinion about watching cartoon

20
18
16
14
12
10
18
8
6 12
4
6
2 4
0 0
Waste of time Can create false Can make violent can make creative No impact
sense of reality

From the above graph we can see that eighteen parents think that cartoons can

make children crteative. twelve of them think that cartoons can creat false sense of reality.

The cartoons children are watching today often shows activities which are just meant to be

funny rather having sense of reality. This shows can be harmful for children. Four among

fourty parents think that watching cartoon is waste of time. More six reffers to no impact of

watching cartoons. Nevertheless no one thinks that watching cartoons can make children

violent.

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Changes on children due to watching cartoon

18
16
14
12
10 18
8
6
12
4 7
2 3
0
Made confident Made Creative Made competitive None of the above

The above graph shows the changes on children due to watching cartoon. Vertical

axis shows the no of respondents and the horizontal axis shows the different options that

are happened due to watching cartoon. Here we can see that eighteen respondent said that

their children are becoming creative due to watching cartoon and seven respondent said

that cartoon are making their children competitive. Here another important thing is, twelve

respondent said that cartoon have no effect on their children. So from this graph we can

coclude that majority of the children are becoming creative due to watching cartoon but it

depends on the content of the cartoon.

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Improvement of a child

20%
Vocabulary

50% listening skill

15%
Sense of humor
None of the above
15%

The above graph shows the imporvement of a child due to watching cartoon. There

were four options which were vocabulary, listening skill, sense of humor and none of the

above. Twenty respondent among fourty that means fifty percent said that their children

don’t have the avobe improvement due to watching cartoon. But twenty respondent said

that cartoons have increased the vocabulary of their children and some other respondent

said that it has imporoved their children sense of humor and listenting skill. So we can

conclude that cartoons have a little improvement on children and among these

improvement the most important is the vocabulary.

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Impacts on Education

37%
Yes, He cannot Concentrate on
study
63%
No, Cartoon Doesn't affect my
children education

Above graph shows percentage of the impacts of cartoon on education of the

children. Here we can see sixty threee percent respondent said that cartoons have negetive

impacts on children and they cannot concentrate on studies due to the cartoon. They want

to watch cartoon all the time. But another thirty seven percent people said that their

children don’t face any educational problem due to watching cartoon. Here maximum

proporton of people supported the negetive impacts of cartoon on children education.

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Secondary data presentation and analysis

A cartoon is several forms of art, with varied meanings that evolved from one to

another. Cartoon is a main source of entertainment for children. From the last five to six

years Dragon ball z, Pokemon, Naruto, Thundercats, Doraemon, Final fantasy etc has

become much popular and attractive among children. These cartoons contain more violent

content than the cartoons of earlier decades. According to Butler, Jeremy (2010), scenes in

cartoons that were considered appropriate for a general audience in the 1940s are not

thought to be too brutal for today’s educated children. There is no uncertainty that cartoon

violence affects children in some way.

Cartoons are making children violent but it depends on the content of the cartoon. If

the contents are violent the children will be violent. Studies by George Gerbner, Ph.D., at

the University of Pennsylvania, have shown that children's TV shows contain about 20

violent acts each hour and also that children who watch a lot of television are more likely to

think that the world is a mean and dangerous place. Although violence presented as real

appears to promote aggression more in adults than violence described as fictional, fictional

violence also seems to make aggression more likely than programming without violent

content (Atkin, 1983).

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Today children are concentrating more on watching cartoon and they spend a huge

time of the day to watch cartoon and as a result they are not emphasizing on physical

activities. Today’s children tend to spend less time on physical activities and study. This is

because they often spend too much time on watching cartoons. In Japan, the availability of

TV accompanied a decline in both time spend on homework and reading skills (Furu, 1962).

This avoidance of physical activities can increase the rate of obesity among the children.

Besides, it also has lessened the practice of their intellectual ability. Parents should be

concerned about how many hours their children are spending on watching cartoons.

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Research findings

Watching cartoons is one of the most primary activity of many children. It is a matter

of concern how many hours do they spend for cartoons and contents are being displayed.

Today cartoon shows exposes much more viloent contents before children. But nevertheless

it does not seem that the behavior of children can be driven much by the content. From the

primary research we saw that most the student who used to like violent contents in the

cartoons also used to be creative at the same time. It appears that the content of the

cartoons do not have much impact on the behavior of the children.

Physiological symptoms like headache, eye, migrane are not necessarily caused for

watching cartoons for long time. Most of the respondents who used to watch cartoons for

long time have faced no impact for that. But there is a considerable responses towards

having headache and eye ache. From the secondary research I found that children tends to

avoid physical activities who watches cartoon for long time.

Cartoons are often responsible for creating false sense of reality to the children.

Almost every cartoons do not have any relation to the real world from which children can

actually learn something. Considering the contents of the cartoons of the recent years, most

respondents think to leave a restriction of time leangth and content. At the same time

cartoon can affect the education of children.

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Recommendation

 Cartoon shows should provide educative material including consequence to the

reality.

 Parents can limit the amount of time children spend watching television, and

encourage children to spend their time on sports.

Limitations

The major limitations of conducting this research are the time and the sample size.

This type of research needs more time and large sample size to correctly get the findings of

the research. The time limitations may result in poor findings. Sample size of the research is

only 40 people, which may not truly reflect the thinking of the whole population. I have

found some respondents were not spontaneous and they give wrong answers and

comments, which resulted in taking five surveys again. The answer given by the respondents

may not be their actual thinking or views. The interviewees’ answers may be biased so that

the results go in favor of them. Finally, there may be some errors from my side, which is

termed as the researcher biasness.

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Conclusion

In the end I would like to conclude that by the research I didn’t mean that cartoons

are not good for children. All I emphasize is that the kids should be provided with quality

entertainment, entertainment is laughter but violence is not the way of doing it. It is

certainly true that cartoon violence does not account for all the causes of children's

aggression, and it is also true that some children are a great deal more likely to be affected

by television violence than others, and that it is these children who are likely to be

potentially more aggressive anyway. But the effect of cartoon violence leads these "at-risk"

children to be even more aggressive than they would otherwise be. And although the group

especially at risk might be a minority of viewers, they are likely to be the majority of

aggressors. This fact makes them, and the violent content of cartoons, worthy of our

attention. Parents should think about how to prevent their children from the bad effects of

cartoons.

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References

Adams, Cecil (1992, July 24). Will sitting too close to the TV, reading with bad light, etc., ruin
your eyes? The Straight Dope. Retrieved November 3, 2004, from
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a5_105.html

Atkin, (1983).Effects of Aggressive and Pro-social Film Material on Altruistic Behavior of

children.Psychological Reports,48:699-
702.http://www.amsciepub.com/doi/abs/10.2466/pr0.1981.48.3.699

Butler, Jeremy (2010). Cartoons. Retrieved March 23, 2010,

fromhttp://www.museum.tv/eotvsection.php?entrycode=cartoons

Clark, L. (2009). Cartoon violence makes children more aggressive.Retrieved from

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1159766/Cartoon-violence-makes-
children-aggressive.html

Cohen, K.F. (2004).Forbidden animation: censored cartoons and blacklisted animators in

america. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company.

Furu, T. (1962).Television and Children’s Life: A Before-after Study. Nippon Hoso

Kyokai:JapanBroadcasting corporation.

Josephson, Wendy (2010). Television Violence: A Review of the Effects on Children of

Different Ages. Retrieved March 24, 2010,
fromhttp://www.mediaawareness.ca/english/resources/research_documents/repor
ts/violence/tv_violence_child.cfm

Shah, A. (2003, October 28). Behind Consumptions and Consumers.

Retrievedfrom http://www.globalissues.org/TradeRelated/Consumption/Children.as
p

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Appendix

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