Children and violence on televisionThrough what they experience on television, children are forced to become adults too young. The innocence of young people is lost when children continually watch a screen displaying the horrors of murder, rape, assault, devastating fires and other natural disasters. Although these are everyday events that adults are accustomed to hearing about, children do not have the maturity level to deal with these tragedies appropriately. Children's behavior changes because they become desensitized to violence. There are many preventative techniques that can be applied to ensure that negativity on television will not interfere with a child's development. Children see acts of violence on television and try to process them, and in doing so, they lose their innocence. According to Dr. David Elkind, president emeritus of the National Association for the Education of Young Children, "Television forces children to cope with many things and inhibits the assimilation of the material. Therefore, the television child knows more than he can ever understand. This gap between the amount of information children have and what they can process is the major stressor of television. (160) Children's minds are not fully developed; therefore they cannot be expected to understand violence on television. The media, especially television, has become increasingly violent, in not-too-subtle ways, exposing many children to behavior that is not appropriate for a young audience. Remember “the Menendez brothers, who mercilessly shot their parents while they were eating ice cream and watching television in their family living room, implanted in the minds of children the worst possibility: that a parent could die violently at the hands of a child. » (Medved, et al. 243) Seeing violence, hearing about it, watching reports of violent acts committed by real people, especially other children, negatively affects the viewer. Children cannot relate to what they see when they are so young, which makes watching violent television extremely questionable. Children should not be told about murder and rape; However, according to Federal Communications Commission Commissioner Gloria Tristani, by the end of elementary school, children have witnessed 8,000 murders and 100,000 acts of violence. (Tristani... middle of paper ...... when it comes to television violence, parents help eliminate the desensitization that occurs when witnessing such wrongdoing. Bibliography Black, Jay and Jennings Bryant. Introduction to Media Communication. Iowa: Brown, 1995. Eisenstock, Bobbie, PhD., and Cathryn C. Borum. Parents' Guide to TV Ratings and V-Chip Washington: Media, 1995. Elkind, David The Hurried Child 1981. . Krcmar, Marina and Patti M. Valkenburg. “A Scale for Assessing Children's Moral Interpretations of Justified and Unjustified Violence and Its Impacts” Communication Research, October 1999: 608-635. ?Lock-Out! pag. Medved, Diane, PhD., and Michael Medved. New York: HarperCollins, 1998. . Telephone interview, June 6, 2000. Tristani, Gloria. “Children and the discourse on violence on television.” page. June 2 2002>.