Peanut butter and jelly go together. Milk and cookies go together. Apparently, so do violent video games and violent children.
Watching violent television programs or video games may affect children's minds — even if they don't already have a history of aggressive behavior.
According to a new study, non-aggressive children who were exposed to high levels of media violence had similar patterns of activity in the area of the brain linked to self-control — the same as aggressive children diagnosed with disrupted behavior disorder.
Should parents just hide the remote once and for all? 'The Situation' host Tucker Carlson and ESPN radio host Max Kellerman take on the violence factor and to what extent people should shield their children from it. As the dialogue unfolds, violence seems to mean different things to different people, parents or not.
TUCKER CARLSON, 'THE SITUATION' HOST: This makes complete sense, Max. We're shaped by the things that we see and that the things that we hear in conversations we have, the movies we watch, the TV shows we sit through, the books we read. If little kids watch a lot of violent material on television, it's going to shape the way they view violence. It's going to make it more acceptable.
MAX KELLERMAN, PANELIST: The hypocrisy here is stunning, stunning, because it was not 24 hours ago that you were telling me, as it relates to a subject looking for violent behavior in young children, aggressive behavior, that it is part of a large left-wing agenda to stigmatize aggressive behavior in children.
CARLSON: No, no. My point was that little boys are inherently interested in violence.
KELLERMAN: OK, and so...
CARLSON: And post-adolescent boys like pornography. Pre-adolescent boys like violence.
KELLERMAN: OK, so they're catering to pre-adolescent boys with violent video games.
CARLSON: It's the same impulse, it doesn‘t mean you should cater to it, however. It does mean that has an effect.
KELLERMAN: This is all based on the premise that coming desensitized to violence is necessarily a bad thing. That seems intuitively correct.
CARLSON: Keep going. I want to hear this.
KELLERMAN: But do you really want your child, especially if all of his peers are becoming desensitized to violence, to be more sensitive to violence? You'll wind up wearing plaid shirts and bowties on television, Tucker.
CARLSON: Look, the point is, violence exists in the world. And it's OK for kids to know about it to some extent.
You do want to shield your kids from a lot of realities. But they don't need to know everything. They're kids.
The problem is violence that's decontextualized, doesn‘t have a context, right, doesn‘t have the crying widows, the grieving family left behind, violence that's all that appears to be pleasure. You don't want kids to think that's what violence is.
KELLERMAN: I don‘t know how much of a difference there is between violence in a Clint Eastwood movie where it's justified because Clint Eastwood is the good guy and violence in Grand Theft Auto where you're actually the bad guy.
The bottom line is, it's violence either way. Why is it OK in the Clint Eastwood movie and not in the video game? Or you're saying it's not OK either way?
CARLSON: I'm saying that violence for its own sake — and a lot of it with blood and gore —can't be good for little kids. And this study suggests it changes their brains.
KELLERMAN: Well, everything changes your brain, Tucker. This conversation today will physically change your brain a little bit. Here's the bottom line.
CARLSON: But in a better way than Grand Theft Auto.
KELLERMAN: You have four kids. I have none. So you really care about this. And to me, let the kids play what they want.
CARLSON: You may change your tune.
