Tomáš Komender

Basics in Writing (E1ZPP)

Article review review
10. October 2022
Influence of violent media on children and adolescents

Link: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(05)66372-6/fulltext

This article I picked is from page called THE LANCET volume 365. The author of
this article is Manfred Spitzer, and he published this article on 16th of April in 2005, so it is
quite older article, but still relatable.

In his work he is mentioning a lot of surveys in which we can see consequences of

watching violent media on television by children and adolescents. The results show us
different consequences on each age group from one to three, from three to five or from five to
fifteen and also reasons why the children and adolescents should avoid consuming violent
media.

One of the first arguments in his article he mentions is survey where was shown the
effect of watching television at the age from one to three. The main effect of watching violent
media was attention deficit disorder, that means the children could not be focus on things they
should be, so they were even more distracted. In the ages of three to five was problem with
their imagination, so they could not anyhow form image of some object in the outside world.
Another of study was shown on situation when two years old child spent two hours per day by
watching violent media. The result of it was that the child’s input started degrading. His or her
senses got worse, smell, touch, hearing and even visual. And it also increased the risk of
getting attention dysfunction and dyslexia. The last and the most interesting research for me
was made by Robinson TN and his colleagues. It was about effect of violent media on obesity
of children and adolescents, and question was “Does television make you fat or do fat people
watch television?”. The research was accomplished on one of two schools from age five to
fifteen. In which students had to reduce their free time spent by watching violent media on
television for half a year. And after those six months they found out that the students had
lower body mass index, and they were heathier and behaved less violent.

From my point of view, author did a good job in this article, even though there are few
things I would like to point out. But firstly, I want to mention the things I like about this
article. Starting with the examples and studies he showed, all of them make sense and I can
relate to them, because the effects of violent media for children and adolescents could be
serious. Next is that not all his examples were scientific and even ordinary person like me
could understand the article. But as I mention, there are things I want to point out. Mainly the
Tomáš Komender
Basics in Writing (E1ZPP)
Article review review
10. October 2022
fact that I do not think violent media could be that bad in ages from twelve to fifteen, because
it depends on the personality of the adolescents. Because not all people ought to behave
violently based on media.