ChrisBurke

**Mass Media and Children BTMM 4998 Fall 20009 Professor Renee Hobbs**

= **Media Violence and Mom** =



My mother is a music teacher at a New Jersey school in a low income, working class town. She has plenty of experience being around children in addition to my younger sister and me. She wears the teacher and mother stakeholder hats during my interview with her about media violence. Her responses to some of my questions over the phone were informative in regards to the subject material and for me, who was usually the example.

I started with our household and the issue of whether media violence had ever manifested itself negatively as the study by Sonya Brady would suggest. Brady had conducted research on whether violence in video games had an effect on the children playing them. She said the only time I ever exhibited any of these negative traits was when I was a wrestling fan in middle school. I had purchased multiple video games based on the wrestling television programs I would watch twice a week. It was not a problem for my mother but she did get a little worried when my father found my bed broken because I had my friends over to run fake wrestling matches of our own.

Once she told me this, I gave her the whole story about how my friends and I had created our very own wrestling federation. We had a title belt, a website, pictures and videos all dedicated to our little group of amateur grapplers. She found it funny but seemed to believe the study might hold some merit in regards to violent media causing aggressive behavior. Either that or it was just “boys being boys” she thought.

When asked about her classroom and whether she could visibly notice and negative effects of media violence her students, she said she was unsure. There was no way to truly know what they were watching at home and how their parents handled violent media, such as television and video games. I informed her that I had purchased the //Grand Theft Auto// game in question at this point to see if she had ever noticed me playing it and to showcase how easy it is for children to get a hold of mature rated games without parents even knowing. She of course had no idea but she had never seen me take any of the extremely violent acts in the video game and try to recreate them like I had done with wrestling. There was a difference and if she had seen me mimicking anything from the game, she would have taken it away immediately.

The dialogue did seem to back up the study in some aspects. There is a strong relation between violent media and aggressive behavior. I knew that I had experienced it myself without having to even ask my mother if she had seen it. Her responses seemed to highlight this point, although she was never overly concerned I might seriously hurt someone in the process of acting on this aggressive behavior. I tried to stay out of trouble and rarely had a reason to be physically aggressive with other people. My behavior was better directed and I may have been letting off some steam by imitating the wrestling moves on television. Ultimately, this might show that the environment that violent media is watched definitely plays into how it will affect the child.

Works Cited

Brady, S., & Matthews, K. (2006). Effects of media violence on health-related outcomes among young men. //Arch Pediatrics Adolescent Medical Journal,// //160//, 341-346.