The behavior children exhibit is influenced by environmental
conditions, however to a lesser extent than the biological factors that
influence behavior, unless the child is severely abused. The environmental
factors have a limited impact when it comes to how a certain individual will
behave when faced with certain conditions. Children may be taught how to
react in certain situations, but just because they see a violent movie or play a
violent video game they are not going to go to school armed to the teeth with
explosives and guns. For people to commit the kinds of actions exhibited in
Columbine Colorado, there has to be some kind of mental dysfunction, not
determined or affected by environmental conditions, driving these
individuals. Therefor, further censorship of television, movies, and video
games is ridiculous and will accomplish nothing.
Environmental conditions such as televison do influence the behavior
of children to a certain extent. Beth Daley brings up the topic of the
emulation of professional wrestling in her article "Elementary School's
Wrestling Children and Youth School Violence." Teachers seem to be
concerned because wrestling it is so easy to emulate. In her article, Ms.
Daley notes the actions of the faculty of Prescott Elementary School in
Norwood by stating that they, "forbid the pupils form coping wrestling
moves on school grounds." She also states that "teachers are trained to
recognize pro wrestling hand signals that double as curse words (Daley)."
This indicates that under certain conditions, environmental conditions, such
as television, can strongly influence the behavior of children. However, it
does not drive them to intentionally harm others. Sparing, inspired by pro
wrestling, can create situations in which injury and anger are a possibility,
thereby leading to actual vi...