Pediatricians and Media Violence

In 1983 the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), an organization of pediatricians dedicated to the health and well-being of children and adolescents, established a five-person Task Force on Children and Television to begin informing the academy about media influences on children and adolescents. Since then, pediatricians have come to recognize the important role that media play in the lives of their young patients (see Figure 1). Dozens of studies published since the early 1990s in Pediatrics and in Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine attest to the fact that media can potentially affect virtually every concern that pediatricians and parents have about children and adolescents—aggressive behavior, school performance, sleep, sex, drugs, eating disorders, language acquisition, even depression, suicide, and attention-deficit disorder (Strasburger, Jordan, & Donnerstein, ...