| Parents (and other adults) can also help children interpret what they are seeing on television and thereby reduce the likelihood of aggressive behavior after viewing violent programming. For example, in an experimental, longitudinal study, researchers taught first and third graders that television characters do not behave like most real people, the actors are only pretending to perform the aggressive acts we see, and most real people use nonaggressive means of solving problems. The children also had to explain in their own words why television is not real. The children who participated in this learning experience showed a reduction in aggression (as rated by their peers) even though the amount of television they watched did not change (Huesmann, Eron, Klein, Brice, & Fischer, 1983). While encouraging, it is important to note that this type of intervention is not necessarily applicable to preschoolers, since they are developmentally less able to understand that television is not real. Children come to understand that what is on the television does not exist in the television between the ages of two and four, depending on cognitive ability and real-world experience. Even by five years of age, though, children do not completely understand that the actors on television exist off television as people separate from their fictional characters (Huston & Wright, 1998). |
