Being
a mother of a six year old child, I have developed a habit of peeping into the
television set every now and then during my child’s extremely rationed viewing hours. This of
course has also led me to ban quite a number of cartoon shows on account of
them being too violent or showing contents unfit to be watched by the children
of this age. In my blog on Woman’s Day, I had voiced my concerns regarding
on-screen gender representation in these cartoon shows but since then I have
discovered quite a number of girl-centric plots which are currently becoming popular. The Barbie
shows in the Cartoon Network often retell a number of old fairy tales but in
different and more woman-centric settings. The new plots which they bring in
are often drawn from similar Fairy Tale classics but what is interesting in
these is that here the action revolves around Barbie, the female protagonist. The
‘Winx Club’ also is a story of a group of fairies and a girl from earth who studied magic in a school for fairies
and their effort to save the world from the destruction and domination by the
evil force of Valtor. These shows are far and fewer as compared to the shows
portraying the boy-hero, nevertheless they are like the silver lining of the
clouds, a pointer to the fact that we as a society are gradually accepting
girls as self-dependent individuals capable of taking charge of situations and
not the mere damsel-in-distress waiting for her saviour knight.
Yet the
television shows for children, particularly the animation serials once again, continue
to disturb me. Their increasingly violent content leaves me baffled and
perturbed. I remember our childhood videos of spider-man, super-man, he-man and
bat-man. They of course contained actions but those were quite simplistic in
their good-wins-over-evil formula. These very superheroes nowadays deal with
evil extremely complex and dark in nature. Added to them are the Power-ranger
Series, and the more recent Ben-ten as well as the 'Winx Club'. Surprisingly, even the Tom and Jerry shows
which consisted of the straightforward cat and mouse chases have added a
generous amount of dark complexities in a number of its movies.
What disturbs me is their target audience. Studies
on child behavior have stressed time and again about the impressionable mind of
children which requires special and careful nurturing and the lasting effect of
childhood visuals on their behaviour. They often believe in the virtual world,
accepting them in their face values. Then by exposing our children to such violence
in terms of save-the-world movies, aren’t we inadvertently accepting such
mindless violence as a way of life and encouraging our children to do the same?
As a
mother I feel concerned regarding such rampant violence on kids’ television. I try
to shield my child from such programmes and steer him towards cleaner and
educative plots like ‘The Little Einsteins’ or ‘The Octonauts’ or simple humour
and wit of ‘Akbar and Birbal’. Yet the concern remains. With so many television
animation series in kids’ channels focusing on violence as the only solution,
it is difficult to keep children out of their almost pervasive influence.
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