The Power Rangers, Batman and Robin, and the six O'clock news; what do all these television programs have in common? They all show violence on television which children tend to imitate. What children observe on television is not beneficial to their lives. They cannot determine if this imitated behavior is right or wrong. Violence on television displays wrong doing to children and infers that the actions characters perform are allowed in society. This is why I feel that violence on television has a detrimental effect on children ages three to ten.
             I am not saying that all television programming is detrimental to all of today's youth, only that most of the television programming is harmful for those ages three to ten to view. These children do not need to see violence every time they turn on the television. Young people have no idea how to interpret what they watch on television. It is proven that "only five years after television was first introduced in the United States, violent crimes increased 25 percent" (Abelman, 1992, p.5). "The average American preschooler watches more than twenty-seven hours of television per week"(Abelman, 1992, p. 4). With these averages being so high, children should be watching television programs that will benefit their learning processes rather then teach them improper lessons in life. Some lessons include physically fighting over the remote from Beavis and Butthead and trying stunts from the Power Rangers.
             Three different studies were conducted by Brandon Centerwall, William Belson, and (Leonard Eron and Rowell Huesmann) in which they found television was harmful to the behavior of adolescence.
             Brandon Centerwall conducted a study comparing homicide rates in South Africa, Canada, and the United States to determine whether exposure to television is a cause of violence. The homicide rate in the US increased 93 percent from 1945 to 1975. In Canada, the homic...