Mass Media On Children s Lives - 1478 Words

Mass Media in Our Children’s Lives What is more important than children? Children define the very notion of innocence in the world, untouched or soiled by the cruelty and brutality of their soon-to-be-inherited society. †¨Generation after generation is brought up and raised through this ruthless and heartless world, struggling to remain pure and preserve their blamelessness. The race to maintain our children’s innocence, however, is now being blatantly surpassed by a new kind of competitor: one never to have been seen before—the media. In modern American society, media plays a vital role in children’s lives that is having damaging effects on them as they mature into our country’s future adults. As a child grows and moves through†¦show more content†¦However, as adolescents grow, and family generally becomes less important to them in their lives and in their decision making processes, thus being replaced by other influences of socializ ation such as friends, media, and popular image (Schaefer 86). Through this slow withdrawal of family prominence in adolescents’ lives, and the evident rise of other determining socializers, the question becomes: what is the substituting primary agent of socialization in these developing children and their lives? Sadly, the answer is the media. Across the United States, youth are exposed in massive amounts to media influence and the dangers that it beholds. For instance, teenagers in the U.S. spend an average of seven hours on media every single day: four hours of which are on television, and two hours spent listening to music or other audio (Johnson). Through these long hours of exposure, media relentlessly extinguishes kids’ positive thinking patterns, replacing them with its own corrupt and immoral techniques which were merely made to create heavier media users and further the media’s moneymaking scheme. Over the course of children’s contact with the t elevision, the average American child sees approximately 20,000 commercials every year (Schaefer 152). Each advertisement, proposing a new idea or product that suggests