The influence of media on children's behavior, habits, actions & self-image

Many children are exposed to men and women’s representation in the media and it affects their behavior, habits, actions and self-image. The reason is that children have brains that are like sponges, they constantly absorbing information from things they see around them and are easily influenced by those things. When children are exposed to the social media universe, they notice the portrayal of male and female’s posts and causes the child to strive for an ideology to be like them.

This representation causes children to have depression because they do not view themselves as perfect beings or that they do not fit in any group because they are not keeping up with popular trends. In my experience when I was a child, one of the things I was exposed to was shows of Super heroes, these shows brought about a level of thinking that a person should always try to be noble and that you should find the goodness in people even enemies. These shows caused me think this way, that everyone is like this and even though this is my experience one can suggest that media mediums and the internet can impact ones perspective for males and females.

Today the media has been making changes on viewership and on children’s viewing by expanding their work by incorporating characters or actors of different shapes and races. They do this to break the idea of a “ perfect” being with masculinity or femininity. In other exmaples: For female examples, there is a campaign called “ He for She” shows a model shift as there are males concerned with female issues. According to Roderick (2017) states that a men’s magazine called GQ have included females into the “ man of the year awards” to support female reader of that magazine. For male examples, according to Femiano and Nickerson (n. d) states,” At the same time, males are discouraged from pursuing many positive traits that are perceived as unmanly.

These include the ability to feel a range of emotions, including fear, hurt, confusion or despair. Even talking about these feelings is considered unmanly. Men are also not encouraged to learn to work cooperatively without the need for control, to love in a nonsexual way, to have friendships or to solve conflicts without violence.” This statement suggest that male males cannot have emotions and conflict is the solution to problems and this can lead to negative impacts. One can suggest in saying that both gendered have their own way of certain portrayals and that the world is still changing and therefore the media will change too. But that does not propose that there will not be any discrimination of an individual deciding of going against the tide or an individual deciding on going against what the internet tells them to behave or look like. Therefore, the media has many ways to go before having only positive effects on children and that the media needs to move faster as technology grows and even younger ages are getting easier accesses to information.