MANY BELIEVE THAT the desire for murderous violence is largely unnatural. For example, it is rare for animals of the same species to fight to the death. In their territorial and mating battles, animals with horns will butt their heads to establish domination. They do not kill each other with their potentially lethal horns. However, against any other species, they turn their heads to the side with the intention to gut and gore. Similarly, piranhas will fight one another with raps of their tails, but they will turn their teeth on anything and everything else. Rattlesnakes wrestle each other, but they do not hesitate to turn their fangs on another species. It is suggested that this tendency is innately imprinted into the genetic code in order to safeguard the survival of the species.
Although primates, both in the wild and in captivity, have been known to murder one another, apes, gorillas, and chimpanzees do not have near the assault or murder rates we humans do. What we have witnessed in animal behavior indicates that such acts of violence by primates are usually the result of a lot of provocation combined with complex social anomalies. And they are rare. Only humans have come to kill each other easily.
One major modern revelation in the field of military psychology is the observation that this resistance to killing one’s species is also a key factor in human combat. Brigadier General S. L. A. Marshall first observed this during his work as the chief historian of the European theater of operations in World War II. Based on his innovative technique of postcombat interviews, Marshall found that only 15 to 20 percent of the individual riflemen in World War II fired their weapons at an exposed enemy soldier.
Marshall’s findings have been somewhat controversial, but every available, parallel scholarly study has validated his basic premise. Paddy Griffith’s data on the extraordinarily low killing rate among Napoleonic and American Civil War regiments, Richard Holmes’s assessment of Argentine firing rates in the Falklands war, the FBI’s studies of nonfiring rates among law enforcement officers in the 1950s and 1960s, and many other individual and anecdotal observations all confirm that humans, by nature, are not close-range, interpersonal killers.
Violent behavior is nurtured over time. We attest that, due to overexposure to gratuitous violent imagery, our children undergo a systematic conditioning process that alters their cognitive, emotional, and social development in such ways as to embed in them a desire and/or conditioned reflex to act out violently without remorse. In this chapter we will discuss the first part of this process, which argues that children’s long-term exposure to violent television and movies makes them easy bait for the conditioning effects of violent video games, the next stage of the process. When both processes are followed rigorously, we may have killers on our hands. And we do.
Conditioning our children and teens to want and need to act out violently starts with environmental saturation of visual violence. John Dewey, the great education innovator, once said, “The environment teaches.” What he meant by that simple statement is that what surrounds the child also teaches the child. Even if you cannot remember a second of your own childhood, have no children of your own, or have never, for some reason, witnessed the actions of a child, you should know that children learn from what’s around them. It’s an inalienable truth. So consider the following:
A preschooler who watches about two hours of cartoons a day is exposed to nearly ten thousand violent episodes each year. At least five hundred of them feature a potent set of contextual features, making them a high risk for teaching aggressive attitudes and behaviors.
Nearly 40 percent of all the violent incidents on television are initiated by characters who possess qualities that make them attractive role models to kids. More than half of these incidents feature physical aggression that would be lethal or incapacitating if it were to occur in real life.
By age eighteen, a typical American child will have seen at least 200,000 dramatized acts of violence and forty thousand screen murders.
When it comes to the question of what our children are learning, the answer is simple: violence, mayhem, and murder. Dr. Alvin Poussaint, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, has stated that exposing children to violent media images is “abuse” similar in effect to physical or sexual abuse or living in a war zone. “None of us,” says Dr. Poussaint, “would willingly put a child into those situations, yet we do not act to keep them from watching movies about things we would be horrified to have them see off the screen.” Why is this so? Why, as a society, do we not see the link between violence on-screen and violence off-screen? Have we become too good at coming up with excuses? “I grew up with violent movies and television, and I don’t want to go out and kill somebody.” Or, “The images are not real, and my kid understands that. It’s just harmless fun, like playing with toy soldiers.” Thinking this way is an easy way out, but it is just not realistic. And, again, we do not dispute that there are many children out there who can absorb screen violence ad infinitum and grow up to be normal, happy, healthy, nonviolent adults. But there are many more who cannot, and for all kinds of reasons.
Excuses like the ones above are misguided. As a society, we have never before had to deal with the huge quantity or intensity of violent imagery as we do today. We have never before on such a massive scale sat toddlers in front of harrowing brutality. In the last thirty years a relatively modest number of channels has turned into a television universe of more than ninety channels, all of them easily accessible. Nor have so many children and teens used vicarious deviancy as real-life amusement as they do today. So we can’t compare our own experiences growing up to our children’s. It’s not accurate, nor is it fair. As home and community environments saturate children with images of sensational violence, a gradual process of systematic desensitization and conditioning begins—not unlike what recruits are put through in the military. They’re broken down, desensitized with constant abuse, endless physical repetitions, and their existing mores and norms are replaced with a new set of values that embrace destruction, violence, and death as a way of life. The difference is that the military has two safeguards: the process of turning someone into a soldier includes powerful doses of discipline and character development; and they’re doing it to adults. It may seem like a stretch to most, but this analogy holds true on the many levels in which screen violence affects the young.
Marines start their training at eighteen; children start a lot earlier than that. From a very early age, a taste for visually vivid depictions of human death and brutality is slowly nurtured in our kids. In American culture, toddlers as young as eighteen months begin with TV programs especially designed for them that contain twice as much violence as adult prime-time viewing. By preschool age, the child is inundated with tangible reinforcers of screen violence that many parents think are necessary for the child’s appropriate acceptance into the peer group. These include action-figure toys, clothing, coloring books, lunch boxes, and other merchandise promoting the latest popular, violent TV programs, movies, or video games.
Since the Mouseketeers hawked Mickey’s ears and Davy Crockett made a furry cap the rage with young wanna-bes, merchandising to children has been an integral part of media entertainment. What has changed drastically since then is the type of violent play our youngsters conceive and act out. And it is due, in large part, to screen influence and the proliferation of the accessories that basically provide a “rubber stamp” for increasingly more deviant forms of “child”s’ play.
Aggressive play is a normal part of a young child’s experimentation. In fact, parents who refuse to buy toy guns for their youngsters report that guns will be made out of sticks, carrots, toilet rolls—basically anything children can get their hands on. This is a normal process. So, too, it is normal for children to imitate what they see on the screen in their play. What is not normal, however, is the almost exclusive acting out of violent roles over and over, so that the media-induced violent images become the sole source for the child’s play fantasies.
In today’s world, youngsters’ play is no longer inner-directed and originally created. In the past, TV characters or movie heroes were a part of a generative play experience. The children incorporated the media images into original ideas such as the re-enacting of the trip to the grocery store taken earlier or the anticipated vacation to the beach. Screen characters would be within a context that included a broad range of characters from children’s real-life activities. The child might be an action figure one day, a postal worker another day, a gardener, bus driver, a mom, dad, teacher, film star. Remember when we were worried that children were playing doctor and nurse? Children would imitate a broad range of adult roles. No longer.
The restrictive aspect of young children’s play is currently a major concern of early childhood educators around the nation. Child-care providers often see that the child who veers from the narrow script of a violent TV program is ostracized by his or her peers when playing. Children who pretend to be teachers rather than Power Rangers are just considered “weird.”
Writing in Psychology Today in 1975, the renowned cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner stated: “It [children’s play] is the vehicle of improvisation and combination, the first carrier of rule systems through which a world of cultural restraint replaces the operation of childish impulse.” In 1975 children were imitating social rules and norms in their creative play more often than they were imitating deviant visual images. So as they acted out their play scenarios, socially acceptable behaviors were being reinforced as youngsters learned to communicate with each other, express feelings, negotiate differences, resolve conflicts. What social “rules” are being reinforced as children act out TV programs that model and reward physical aggressiveness? How can youngsters possibly learn “social restraint” if their creative play consistently models the impulsive violent behavior they see on the screen?
The most popular children’s television shows in 1995 included Spider-Man, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, Masked Rider, and X-Men. All of these programs contained extremely violent behaviors perpetrated by fantasy heroes. Also, each of these programs produced an entire line of toys and other licensed products. Visual messages of domination, revenge, and physical abuse become easier for our youngsters to act out when they are surrounded by merchandise reinforcing those messages. The World Wrestling Federation sells action figures “with bone-crunching action” to children ages five and up.
By the teen years, how do we then take back the cumulative impact of applauding violent behavior as a normal problem-solving technique, natural tendency, and acceptable social norm? “No, we didn’t really mean for you to take us seriously. It’s all just in fun. No one takes those wrestlers seriously. You must know Bruce Willis didn’t mean it’s okay to hurt someone else. Do you think killing your teacher will solve your problem? You can’t be serious, can you?’
Emotionally laden images are even more efficient at catching and holding the attention of youngsters than educational demonstrations. Because kids attend so readily to the visually exciting and emotional portion of the screen content, this violent imagery is so much more easily remembered and learned by children under eight or nine years old. They respond to emotional content with feelings such as fear and fright, but they are unable to put graphic visual images and the emotions they arouse within an understandable framework. Also, young children are unlikely to pick up on the subtlety of the images” mitigating information—such as negative motivations, punishment that occurs later in the program, or the suffering of victims—and put it into some kind of context.
The impact of violent imagery on children is best understood within the context of normal child development. Children are born with an instinctive capacity and desire to imitate adult behaviors. That infants can, and do, imitate an array of adult facial expressions has been demonstrated in newborns as young as a few hours old—before they are even old enough to know that they themselves have facial features that correspond with those they are observing and imitating. Babies as young as fourteen months old clearly observe and incorporate behaviors seen on television.
For example, there is the case of a preschooler who expressed fear and hostility toward black people after watching Roots on television with her family. After describing a vivid scene in which a slave gets repeatedly whipped, the child said that the man being whipped must be a very bad person, and therefore must be very scary.
Young children have an instinctive desire to imitate the behavior of others, but they do not possess an instinct for gauging whether a behavior ought to be imitated. They will imitate anything, including behaviors most adults would regard as destructive and antisocial. Since youngsters do not have the brain capacity yet for analysis, evaluation, or moral judgment, they are developmentally unable to discern the difference between fantasy and reality; if they did, we wouldn’t have too many kids believing in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy. Therefore, they are incapable of interpreting violent images, of making personal sense out of them.
The inherent inability to distinguish fantasy from reality, although developmentally appropriate, means that, in the minds of young children, media violence is a source of entirely factual information regarding how the world works. Studies indicate that “real” to a young child appears to mean physically existing in the world. They may regard police dramas to be real because police officers do exist. One second-grade student in a study explained that the members of the Brady Bunch were real because “they have a refrigerator, and there are such things as refrigerators.”
And there is no limit to a child’s credulity. For example, an Indiana school board had to issue an advisory that stated that there is no such thing as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles—that they do not exist. Too many children had been crawling down storm drains looking for them.
When a young child sees somebody being shot, stabbed, raped, brutalized, degraded, or murdered on TV, to them it is as though it is actually happening. Imagine children of three, four, or five watching “splatter” movies in which they spend sixty minutes learning to relate to a cast of characters and then in the last sixty minutes of the movie they watch helplessly as their newfound friends are hunted down and brutally murdered. This is the moral and psychological equivalent of introducing a child to a group of new friends, letting them play with those friends, and then butchering them in front the child. And this happens to many children again and again throughout their early development.
While children experience cognitive confusion about what they see on the screen, that does not keep them from imitating violent behaviors. In fact, the more often children watch violent television programs and movies, the more likely it is that they will develop and sustain highly aggressive heroic fantasies for years to come. Then, in a vicious cycle, the children who create violent fantasy play and who identify with aggressive heroes are the ones most likely to be affected by media violence.
Here’s a scary scenario: A seven-year-old boy described a deliberate attempt to reduce his own fear by identifying with a character in A Nightmare on Elm Street. “It was easy,” he said. “I pretended I was Freddy Krueger. Then I wasn’t scared. Now, that’s what I always do and I am never scared.” Since identifying with an aggressive hero can increase real-life aggression, this tactic for reducing fear is chilling indeed.
Learning is carried out in two stages: imitation and identification. At the beginning, learning comes through imitation; with enough repetition, identification takes place. As kids imitate the violence they see on-screen through imitative play, they are learning to identify themselves as perpetrators of violence . . . from the very beginning of their lives! It has been found that the more unrealistic the character, the more preschoolers both want to be like that character and think they are like that character. Also, young children are more likely to choose fantasy heroes over real-life heroes in their play, more likely to engage in more heroic adventure play, and more likely to learn about heroes and play themes from television rather than from friends, siblings, or parents.
Children with a propensity for violence usually have both learning and behavior problems and are labeled “difficult” by teachers and parents. From the onset of their formal schooling years they come to identify themselves as bullies and schoolyard thugs. They not only use violence as a mainstay of amusement and imitate it at every opportunity, but also identify themselves as violent people. Early childhood is a formative time of ego development. We all know an adult who doesn’t believe us, no matter how much we tell them they are pretty, smart, and capable. They see themselves as ugly, stupid, inept. They see themselves that way largely due to the messages they received about themselves as children. Recurring childhood messages impress young minds. Once believed, they are very difficult to change later in life.
Everything the young child experiences and learns is latent, ready for the right circumstance to trigger future behaviors. Serious violence is most likely to erupt at moments of severe stress—and it is precisely at such moments that adolescents and adults are most likely to revert to their earliest, most visceral remembrance of violence. Consider the power of such violent “imprinting” on a little boy who watches his dad beat his mom repeatedly. He is two, three, four, or five years old and he despises this behavior and he hates his father. But if he is not careful, twenty years later, when he is under stress and he has a wife and kids, what is he likely to do? He will do the same thing he saw his father do. Why? He, of all people, should understand how despicable this behavior is, how much his children will hate him. How much he’ll hate himself. But he can’t help it—it was burned into his system at an early age and imprinted on how he deals with like situations.
Now consider that this little boy not only observes domestic violence, but is also physically abused himself. He distracts himself from the pain he experiences by watching television. Like 56 percent of children between twelve and seventeen in our country, he grows into later childhood and early adolescence by escaping to his bedroom and watching TV or rented videos. He likes watching violence. The violent imagery, in fact, reinforces and justifies the violence he is experiencing in the home. How much more likely is it that he will become a violent abuser himself?
An estimated four million American children are victimized each year by physical abuse, sexual abuse, domestic violence, community violence, and other traumatic events. When television is added to this equation, more stress is added to the child’s life. Research has found that abused children watch more television than other children do, prefer violent programs, and appear to admire violent heroes. Children who are both abused and watchers of a great deal of television are most likely to commit violent crimes later in life.
However, many of the twenty million children in this country are experiencing a form of abuse in the constant bombardment of violent visual messages throughout their childhood and adolescence. All are being imprinted with visual directives that make violence socially acceptable and that encourage violent self-expression. The severity of that imprinting is dependent upon the degree of violence in the child’s home environment, the amount of screen violence taken in daily, and the beliefs the child holds about his or her self and the world.
The brains of violent people are different from the brains of nonviolent people. Violent or aggressive people have decreased activity in the prefrontal cortex, leading to troubled thinking and problems in the left temporal lobe, leading to a short fuse. How do adult brains come to have such problems? There are a number of reasons, but could saturation with violent, fast-paced screen images play a significant role?
The brain of the child is not a miniature version of the adult brain. Although the child’s heart is a miniature replica of an adult heart and the lungs tiny versions of future adult lungs, the young brain is an organ that will change considerably as it matures over the course of childhood and adolescence. As it builds neural structures for optimal development, the young brain is very vulnerable to stimulus from its environment. A lack of the proper kinds of stimulus, combined with the wrong kind of stimulus at inappropriate times, can cause permanent damage.
In today’s world the proper kinds of stimulation needed for children to develop healthy brains are being displaced by so much time spent in front of a screen. Children growing up as spectators, staring at two-dimensional images for four or more hours daily, do not get enough physical movement, tactile, 3-D experiences, problem-solving practice, or opportunities for language expression and skill-building that they would get with less time watching and more time doing. These real-world activities are absolutely vital. Without them, the cortex, including the vital prefrontal cortex, which acts as a dampening switch to impulsive behavior in healthy and mature adults, cannot develop appropriately.
In addition to displacing activities imperative to health brain development, a fixation with violent on-screen images can alter the brain’s alert system, causing more hyperactivity and impulsive behaviors. Violent images keep the story plot or the video game moving fast and the excitement high. The low brain, the seat of our survival instinct, stays ever on alert. When this part of the brain is preoccupied with danger, the cerebral cortex, or seat of rational thought, is hard-pressed to function optimally.
Screen violence can increase the reactivity of the brain stem. Children’s hearts race, their eyes bug out, their breathing comes in gasps as they munch on snacks and watch the body count soar. The brain’s alarm network, known as the “fight or flight mechanism,” sits at the base of the brain and sends out noradrenaline pathways to other brain centers that control heart rate, breathing, blood pressure, emotions, and motivation. As the highly charged screen images constantly assault the brain, the noradrenaline gauge rises, keeping the body in a constant state of readiness—easy to startle, quick to blow up. In effect, violent images keep the instincts and feelings keenly aroused while reducing thinking functions.
Television and movie violence overstimulate our children and overstress their brains. The faster and the more salient the violent imagery, the more likely it is that our kids will be in states of emotional arousal. It is the fast action and the quick cuts of today’s programming that keep the young brain on alert, in a way very similarly to the soldier who is on alert in the battlefield, or an abused child who is on alert for the next slap.
Children of abusive parents tell how they huddle together with their siblings and listen, with their hearts racing, to their tormentor’s steps on the stairs, the jingle of his keys, the sound of his voice. When the abuser is in view they watch him constantly, never taking their eyes off of him. Like feral animals, they have learned at an early age the habit of vigilantly monitoring their environment for any sign of danger.
This capacity to identify and monitor sources of potential violence and danger in our environment is a powerful survival mechanism. But when children are in constant threat of danger, they become hypervigilant. They continue to monitor their environment for perceived threats even when they are in a safe environment.
While violent images are keeping our kids on alert, they just sit there. There is no way to release the energy building up inside them. Unless the child can discuss the feelings associated with those horrific images with a caring adult, those feelings have nowhere to go. Feeling scared that Freddy’s going to get you when you go to bed? Feeling like it might be cool to carry a gun, as your hero does? Feeling fascinated with all the blood and gore, yet slightly ashamed about that at the same time? Feeling sexually aroused at the beating of a near-naked woman and very guilty at the same time? How do our kids understand and disperse all the feelings that watching violence arouses? Unfortunately, most children and teens don’t get these vital opportunities. There’s no one around to talk with them at these crucial moments. As a society, we have deemed TV and videos our number one baby-sitter. It gives us a needed break, to hop in the shower, get dinner on the table, or just read the newspaper and unwind after a busy day. But if we don’t know what that baby-sitter is spitting out at our kids, we are all, children, parents, and society, paying a huge price.
Instead of learning to put the emotional reactions within a thoughtful context, instead of struggling to make sense out of the sensational and find some way to understand what is happening, kids cheer, boo, whistle, yell, and continue to promote a hyped feeling state. The thinking function has taken a vacation.
Hearts can become desensitized when minds stop making connections. Where does a conscience come from? Our lower brain with its survival mechanism, quick to react to any perceived threat, can’t help us here. It’s the developed mind with a well-equipped equipped imagination that gives us the capacity for compassion. When we say to a child, “Imagine what it’s like to be homeless,” the first prerequisite is that the child must have an imagination. In order to have any inkling of empathy for the homeless, the child must have a thinking function for understanding and an imaginative ability for visualization. And those capacities cannot and will not develop as our children consume violent images, alone, for fun.
How often do we now hear of kids being indifferent to the violent crimes they commit? In Florida, for instance, a six-year-old boy and his friend got into a fight in his apartment. Finally, to end the matter, the boy maneuvered his friend out onto the balcony and pushed him over the railing, sending him to his death ten floors below. Twenty minutes later, the police came upstairs to ask some questions. The boy was watching cartoons on television. During the questioning, the boy continued to watch cartoons and eat pizza. He was perfectly calm.
How can a child become this desensitized? When children start off in an alarm state with high noradrenaline and impulsive behavior, they often revert to low noradrenaline levels and calculating behaviors. Brains in a constant hyped state get worn out and sociopathic behaviors are the result. You need only recall when Michael Carneal, the fourteen-year-old boy who killed three classmates in Paducah, Kentucky, or Andrew Golden, the eleven-year-old killer in Jonesboro, Arkansas, were brought to court to face their crimes. Their eyes looked dead, they betrayed nothing physically or emotionally that would suggest they had just gunned down children in cold blood. We want to see some remorse; instead we see nothing that would indicate that these young boys understood their actions.
Research indicates that children may be deliberately trying to conquer their fears of vulnerability and victimization by desensitizing themselves through repeated exposure to horror movies.
But to the extent that they desensitize themselves to screen violence and fear, they are also becoming more tolerant of violence in the real world. And more tolerant of themselves as perpetrators of violence.
Dr. William Belson interviewed 1,565 youths who were representative of thirteen- to seventeen-year-old boys living in London. These boys were interviewed on several occasions concerning the extent of their exposure to a selection of violent TV programs broadcast over a twelve-year period. The level and type of violence in these programs was rated by the BBC viewing panel. It was thus possible to obtain, for each boy, a measure of both the magnitude and type of exposure to televised violence. Also, each boy’s behavior was determined by a self-report indicating involvement in any of fifty-three categories of violence over the previous months. The degree of seriousness of the acts reported by the boys ranged from taunting to more serious and violent behavior. The boys reported atrocities: “I forced a girl to have sexual intercourse with me; I bashed a boy’s head against a wall; I threatened to kill my father; [and] I burned a boy on the chest with a cigarette while my mates held him down.” After controlling for one hundred other factors, it was found that boys who had watched above-average amounts of television violence were currently engaged in rates of serious violence 49 percent higher than that of boys who had watched below-average quantities of violence.
Constant exposure to screen violence can profoundly affect both children and adults in two important ways: we can come to need a daily dose of violent media, and we can build an immunity to violent imagery, becoming incapable of producing socially acceptable emotional responses. As our kids desire increased levels of violence and become more and more desensitized, they are constantly learning that harming is fun, “natural,” and the “right” thing to do.
To make humans continue doing something naturally repulsive, you make it fun for them. This is called classical conditioning. The Japanese army very effectively used classical conditioning with their soldiers. Early in World War II, Chinese prisoners were placed on their knees in a ditch with their hands bound behind them. And one by one, young, unbloodied Japanese soldiers had to go into the ditch and bayonet “their” prisoners to death. This is a brutal, horrific way to have to kill another human being. Up on the banks, their friends would cheer them on in their initiation to violence. Afterward, they were treated to the best meal they’d had in months, sake, and “comfort girls.” The result? They were not just desensitized to violence; they were taught to enjoy violence, to associate human death and suffering with pleasure.
This technique is so morally reprehensible that there are very few examples of it in modern U.S. military training. Yet every day children of all ages and in all stages of brain and ego development watch vivid pictures of human suffering and death for fun and come to associate horror with their favorite soft drink, candy, girlfriend’s perfume, birthday party celebrations, or comfort in the hospital bed.
Once the brain solidifies the link between pleasure and violence, it is difficult to convince it that it isn’t normal to do so. Endorphins remember. The thrill of seeing violence becomes “cool,” the rush repeatable. Columbine was horrifying. What about all the youths who reportedly wanted to imitate the violence after Columbine? How horrifying is that?
Every state had their share of such children—children who thought the events at Columbine were overwhelmingly “cool.” Children who talked about repeating the tragedy—not from the victims’ perspective, but from the murderers’ viewpoint. The emotional reaction for the normal teen ought to be outrage, anger, revulsion, and disgust toward the perpetrators and empathy and compassion for the victims. And, don’t get us wrong, we do realize that many kids have these feelings. But too many do not, and not long ago such attitudes would have been clearly defined as sick and twisted. We have to be careful. The increasing number of “normal” youths expressing the abnormal desire to kill other human beings may be desensitizing us. Are we forgetting what is normal behavior for our children? Are we lowering our expectations and standards as our children change?
AIDS doesn’t cause people to die. Rather, it destroys the immune system and makes the victim vulnerable to death by other factors. The “violence immune system” exists in the human brain. The conditioning of our children by violent visual entertainment creates an “acquired deficiency” in this immune system. AVIDS, “Acquired Violence Immune Deficiency Syndrome,” weakens appropriate cognitive, emotional, and social development, causing more children to become increasingly vulnerable to other violence-enabling factors in our society such as poverty, discrimination, drugs, and the availability of guns. Children with weakened violence immune systems also become increasingly vulnerable to conditioning. Their attitudes, behavior, and values change as a result.
Although only a small percentage are currently committing violent crimes, many of our kids are developing AVIDS. We are losing the battle as parents to condition our children to be responsible, caring, peaceful, intelligent individuals. And it should not be happening. When you think about it, we shouldn’t have to contend with such overt negative influences. There are enough real-world negative influences bombarding children as it is. Sure, our children just might come out of their younger years unscathed, well-adjusted, and nonviolent—but it’s getting harder and harder for them to do so.