It seems that every year children spend more and more time watching television. Some parents will even use the television as a "babysitter" to have some time for themselves, or maybe add a little peacefulness to their day. One of the most popular type of shows with children today are cartoons. Nearly all cartoons show an array of prosocial acts, but also depict some violent and aggressive acts. Violence is discouraging whether it is physically or mentally harmful. Other things these programs might contain are gender and racial stereotyping. In order to determine how often many of these acts occur I watched a variety of cartoons including Recess, which airs on Saturdays from 9 to 10 AM on ABC's "Disney's One Saturday Morning", along with Rugrats, CatDog, Rocket Power, and Pinky and the Brain that are all part of the Nickelodeon family, and air Monday through Friday between 2 and 8 PM. Also, these programs are shown numerous times throughout the weekend on the same channel. While watching these cartoons, I correspondingly noticed the commercials and how they related to gender.
             I tended to find that there were just about an equal amount of prosocial acts and aggressive acts in four of the shows that I watched, with the exception of Pinky and the Brain, which was more aggressive. I was pleased to find many examples of prosocial acts while I was viewing the other four shows. One example came from the cartoon Recess, where a character named T.J., a fourth grader, was captured by the kindergartners and forced into a five year-old's lifestyle. His friends see that he is in trouble and try everything they can think of to help get him released. In a different episode of Recess, the gang finds a one hundred dollar bill on the ground. They decide to go around and ask if anyone was missing money. When they came up short for answers, they went to the house of the richest man in town, figuring that he...