Eyes Wide Open: Kids and Media Violence

The present “kids-eye” view of media violence began with a dinner table discussion among the three authors: a psychologist/psychoanalyst father (IM); his eight-year-old daughter (LM); and his 11-year-old son (ZM). The initial topic concerned the reactions of a New York area grammar school class to the events of September 11, 2001. Because a large number of students had talked about the disturbing effects of television coverage, we wanted to understand better how children both understood and were affected by television and movie violence.

But what exactly did we mean by “violence”? Very quickly, our research became engulfed in what William James called the “psychologist's fallacy.” For us, this meant that a grown-up's notions of violence varied from those of his children at the latency-preadolescent border. We agreed that the best way to proceed was by the inductive method. Beginning with media vignettes that caught our attention, we would understand a kid's view of television violence through concrete examples. A lethal shark attack in a prime-time television airing of a classic James Bond film provided our starting point. ZM suggested that the criterion of realism controlled a child's assessment of violence. He observed, “You know that its fake because sharks don't just come out and eat you up, it takes blood to lure them.” Further, it was well known that lamb's blood and not human is used in cinematic staging; therefore, how could the scene be scary? A television scene's induction of scariness, or fear, was the operational test of whether it was judged as violent.

The realism argument generated considerable thought and discussion. It suggests a defensive posture, employing thought to ameliorate discomfort. To test this idea, we considered the presence of skeletons in movies as another example. Some skeletons do “totally unrealistic things like move in and out of bodies.” Others, such as those that walk like human beings, are scarier because walking falls within the