In a way popular culture has made us all smarter, stupider, nicer, meaner, healthier, unhealthier, gentler and more aggressive. I want to focus on the meaner aspect though, because I feel like today kids are a lot meaner than they were 50 years ago. Even 10 years ago. There's a lot more bullying out there and this IS due to media. Because of the internet bullies can find you and target you at home too. With this bullies have become smarter. Not necessarily book smart, but tech smart. They know how to manipulate better and bully without being caught. They don't get caught mainly because physical fights have now turned into technological fights. When you're fighting on the internet or through texts you don't get black eyes and cuts, you get emotional trauma, which doesn't heal nearly as quickly.
Another reason kids are meaner is because movies and shows they're watching. My cousins are 5 and 7. One night we were watching Disney Channel and a movie came on about a girl who was turning 16. She was the main character and she was HORRIBLE. She did mean things to everyone and treated her "bestfriend" like dirt. In the end she ended up "learning her lesson" as always in kids movies but I felt the ten minutes they spent on the lesson didn't really make up for the 50 minutes of torture she reigned down on others. They also made this main character the best looking in the whole movie and this reminded me of the movie Mean Girls. I personally love that movie but all the bullies were the popular girls who were the prettiest. When a ittle kid watches a movie like that, or with any situation like that (which happens often) they likely won't pay attention to the ten minutes at the end where they learn their lesson and "change their ways". They're more focused on the rest of the movie where the mean "pretty" girls get ahead the whole time and have control over everyone else. I believe these movies, ontop of everything on the internet is teaching younger and younger kids that it's okay to be mean because it gets you ahead of others and that there really aren't any real consequences to acting that way.
My daughter is 2 and she loves icarley on disney channel. Maybe you have seen it? she thinks that its the coolest show. icarley is the good one always trying to get samantha(her Bff) to do the right thing, for the most part. I hope that she sees that the idea is more the focus of doing the right thing then being silly and Mischievous like sam often does. I don't think that we really think about what we are doing when creating childrens programming.
ReplyDeleteThere's a possibly dangerous lesson there about how being pretty gives you permission to be just as nasty as you want to be.
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