A NURSERY OF VIOLENCE?
The chicken bobbed around, darting now here, now there. Randomly. There was no head. I couldn’t help noticing. I was 5 years old. The neighbor boy was showing me how to cut chickens’ heads off with an axe. Then he said that the horn on my Lionel electric train sounded like pigs being electrocuted. These images have never left my mind. They never will. It was rumored there was a lot of domestic violence at his house.
All of us have had a childhood. Not all childhoods and not all of our childhood, are sweet, sunny or soothing. We have known for a long time that childhood is a crucial period in a person’s emotional development. Before Freud, both Shakespeare and Plato knew it. In 1909, Freud published a report of a 5 yr. old boy who had been traumatized by seeing a horse fall down dead and who then became afraid his father would die. That boy, whom Freud called “Little Hans” grew up to be Herbert Graf, a famous producer at the Metropolitan Opera.
There is no certainty that children traumatized by violence and distress can grow up to lead such productive lives. Not all children receive such expert care, even if not by a Freud. But all children deserve to be protected from the wounds that make such care necessary.
One source of such wounding is the violence in the media marketed to children. While there has been much talk and debate in the wake of the Newtown massacre, little has been said about the effect of media violence in stimulating aggressive behavior in children and young adults.
Childhood is strewn with ordinary calamities: the birth of a sibling, a disappointing experience with a parent or friend, a painful medical procedure, the loss of a beloved grandparent. Children have varying degrees of resilience to such experiences, not predictable in advance. Children can address such experiences with the help and loving support of family and if necessary psychological treatment.
We know from this that adult society needs to protect our vulnerable charges from experiences with which they cannot cope emotionally, experiences which cause so much anxiety, sadness, helplessness or rage as to overwhelm the child’s capacity to manage and contain them. This leads to impulsive emotional outbursts because s/he needs to find some way of discharging the unbearable internal tensions that such experiences produce.
The exposure of children to television, movie and videogame violence is as humdrum as hotdogs and ice-cream. It shouldn’t be. Prof. John P. Murray at Kansas State University and researchers at Michigan (Leonard Eron and Rowell Huesmann) have reported studies for years showing that exposing children to violent action images in any of these media is associated with an increased tendency to act violently. A child doesn’t have to witness a chicken having its head cut off to be affected by a violent image.
Murray’s neuropsychological studies suggest in fact that such exposure triggers brain reactions which bypass the frontal cortex—the area of reasoning and judgment in the brain – and thus render the child prone to irrational impulsive acts without regard for the consequences.
We know from experimental studies and clinical experience that children cannot tolerate the emotional impact of intense violence whether from personal experience or exposure to violent images for the simple reason that they are not yet fully grown, i.e. they have not yet developed the capacity to tolerate and channel the emotional reactions they have to such images in ways that are not harmful to themselves or others, the way most adults can.
This is the emotional experience of the child during such episodes — a sense of complete helplessness and of being swept up in a sea of feelings that is uncontrollable, even if the child knows better. Psychoanalysts since Freud are very familiar with this phenomenon of the overstimulation of children through experiences which the child is too immature, uninformed or not yet sufficiently emotionally robust to tolerate. Overstimulation delivers an emotional shock, a trauma.
All of us are vulnerable to overwhelming experiences of one kind or another, even as adults. Our veterans coming back from the Iraq and Afghan wars know this well. However, children are not adults and it is time we started treating them like children again, respecting their developmentally vulnerable minds.
Society should be a nursery for the emotional lives of our children. We should act as if we really accept that childhood is a protected period of development, no different from providing seedlings with a sheltered environment in a nursery. Instead we seem to be in a frenzy, hiving after that latest violent videogame to give our kids for Hanukah or Christmas. What are we doing? Creating a nursery of violence?
Thanks..
Merton A. Shill, JD., LLM., PhD., FIPA
Department of Psychiatry
University of Michigan Medical School