- Introduction
- Research title: Effects of Television on young children
- Thesis statement - Watching television has positive and negative effects on young children. By limiting the number of hours a child can watch television and carefully selecting the shows the child can watch, parents can increase the positive effects offered by television to children while minimizing the negative effects.
- Criteria for online research
- Search engine optimization – Google is the search engine to be used in the research mainly due to its well organized results and the author’s familiarity with its interface allowing for efficient online research.
- Key Words – The key words to be used during the online research are; benefits, value and impacts of television on children, benefits, value and impact of children television shows. In addition, the disadvantages and advantages of watching television will be given priority when determining the value of a source.
- Selecting credible sources of information - A major challenge of online research is selecting credible information from works that are not reliable. To this end, the author will depend on reputable websites such as state press, Reuters and oedb.org rather than blogs which do not give references and citations and rarely include the qualifications of the author to qualify him/her as an expert in the topic.
- Advantages of watching television for children
- The learning process – The learning process in children can be passive or active with different outcomes depending on the tools used. Lillard and Peterson assert that children learn some of their first vocabularies from the television making it an important too for teaching young children basic things (p 155).
- Visual stimulation – Watching television stimulates the brain improving processing of visual information leading to holistic development. This correlates well to research findings that show the effectiveness of using visual images to explain different concepts to children (Isaacs, 73).
- Disadvantages of watching television for children
- Eye damage – Watching the television for long hours from close to the screen can affect eyesight (Sigman, 942).
- Discouraging physical exercise – Watching television is a passive process unlike playing in the field. Children who watch television for long hours have little time for physical exercise hampering muscle development and encouraging obesity.
5.0 Maximizing the benefits and minimizing the disadvantages of watching television for children
- Selecting the shows a child can watch – This promotes the benefits of watching television by allowing parents to focus on educative shows only
- Limiting the number of hours a child can watch television – This reduces the negative effects of television and minimizes the exposure of children to content meant for other age groups.
6.0 Conclusion
a) Relating the research findings to the stated thesis.
Woks Cited
Isaacs, David. “Television and children.” Journal of Pediatrics and Child Health, 47.3 (2011):
71-72. Print.
Lillard, Angeline and Peterson, Jeniffer. “The immediate impact of different types of television
on young children’s executive function,” Journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, 34, (2011): 112-119. Print.
Sigman, Aric. “Time for a view on screen time,” Archives of Disease in Childhood, 97.11
(2012): 935-942. Print.
