the T.V. and American children

• The average child watches 1,680 minutes of television per week (28 hours)

• 50% of children between the ages of 6 to 17 have a tv in their room
• 70% of daycare centers use television during a typical day
• American youth spend an average of 700 hours a year in school
• American youth average watching 1,500 hours of television a year.
• Children are exposed to 30,000 commercials a year.
  

In a study conducted by the National Institute of Mental Health, it was found that children have a difficult time deciding what is fiction, and what is reality. They embellish stories with their own ideas, added people and objects not in the movie they had watched, and had a hard time telling when a story ended. Nearly half of the children in the study thought a person on television had spoken directly to them and 20% had actually answered back. It's not until age 10 that children are generally able to identify cartoons as fantasy and can distinguish between funny and serious violence. Children cannot identify the motives behind acts of violence.

Silverblatt, Art. Media Literacy: Keys to Interpreting Media Messages. 2nd Edition. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001.