Letter: Violent TV movies for children

I love watching TV shows. TV has been an important thing in my life since I was a little boy. I still remember how hard my parents tried to get my eyes off the TV throughout my primary and high school years.  

TV programs and shows have changed enormously in the last 20 years. One important change is that TV stations now provide a guideline called “program classification” for its audience before a show. The guideline informs us about what sort of things will appear on a show – whether there will be a high or low level of violence, coarse language, drug use, or sex scenes in the show.

In general, I like this program classification guideline. But when it comes to children, I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, the classification really helps parents in deciding which show is suitable for their children and which one is not. But on the other hand, it has a potential to misguide parents for the same reason. Let me try to explain.

One movie with a low level of violence may be OK for a teenager. But what happen if a teenager watches five movies with low violence content in a day? My hypothesis is that several low-violence-level movies watched simultaneously within a short period of time (e.g. in a day), may have an accumulative effect that is similar to one high-violence-level movie targeted at a more mature audience.  So the program classification’s approval can provide parents with a “misguided” safe feeling in allowing their children to watch superheroes beat villains in many ways and styles from 7 a.m. until 1 p.m. during weekends, since parents are not informed about the accumulative psychological effects of watching a series of low-violence-level scenes.

Since the program classification only tells the “level” and not the “dose” of a show, the classic advice of saying “don’t watch too much telly” to children may still do the trick.

Rony Sitorus
Jakarta