What do sex, drugs and obesity have in common? According to one UNM doctor, the answer is simple – the media.
Victor Strasburger, pediatrician and chief of UNM Adolescent Medicine, compiled research into one article about how all media, including TV, video games and Internet affect children.
“The media can be extraordinarily useful in keeping kids healthy, but most of the time they’re not,” he said.
Strasburger found that violence is the biggest problem in the media today.
“You pick up the paper now and you hardly flinch when you read about some mass killing in a post office, mall or school,” he said. “It’s no longer front page news. There is a problem with that.”
Strasburger said many Americans have become desensitized to violence in media. One study he looked at found that 100 percent of college students can remember the first scary movie they saw, and it still scares them.
“In our society we have not done a very good job of keeping kids away from media violence,” he said. “We tend to think, ‘It’s harmless. It’s entertainment.’”
Strasburger said that almost every child who is obese or overweight spends more than two hours per day in front of a TV, playing video games or on the Internet.
“Kids are now spending more than seven hours per day with a variety of different media,” he said. “That’s more time that they spend in school or any other activity except for sleeping.”
Strasburger said this research is especially important for UNM students, even if they’re not parents.
“I’m sure there are lots of students at UNM who either currently have young children or anticipate having children in the future,” he said. “Potential parents need to understand how important the media have become in kids’ lives.”
Student Elizabeth Johnson said she has witnessed the way video games can affect children.
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“When my nephew was a little kid, he used to hit his mom, and he was always playing video games,” she said. “Kids are encouraged to kill the enemy, and I think they can get confused about who is the good guy and who is the bad guy.”
Student Kay Plassmeyer said she has two teenagers at home. She said she has seen the negative effects of media to a certain degree.
“With TV and video games, I think that kids don’t get an accurate view of real life,” she said. “They just don’t reflect reality.”
The easiest way to decrease the negative effects of media, Strasburger said, is to not let it get out of control in the first place.
“It’s very hard for a child who is watching five hours of TV to get them to cut down to one or two hours per day,” he said.
Many pediatricians are starting to do a “media history” with children and parents, Strasburger said. A media history is a survey with two questions: How many hours of TV does the child watch per day, and does the child have a TV or Internet connection in his or her room.
Children shouldn’t watch more than two hours of TV per day or have a TV in their room, Strasburger said. Controlling exposure to bad media isn’t just a parent’s job, he said, it’s the media’s responsibility as well.
“Hollywood needs to understand with the millions and billions of dollars it makes every year comes a public health responsibility,” he said.
Box:
Read Victor Strasburger’s article, “Children, Adolescents and the Media: Issues and Solutions,” by typing his name into the search bar at Pediatrics.AAPPublications.org
