So it’s almost halloween and I have violence on my mind.  Really you can hardly go anywhere or turn on the tv without some ghoulish face staring you down, a blood coated dagger in its hand.  But the violence problem I want to talk about came in the form of a warning from the American Academy of Pediatrics a few days ago, and frankly it’s got me a lot more scared than any monster face.

Here’s a direct quote from the AAP Policy statement on Media Violence:  “The evidence is now clear and convincing: media violence is 1 of the causal factors of real-life violence and aggression.  Therefore, pediatricians and parents need to take action.”

At the National Institute on Media and the Family, we’ve been doing research and sounding the alarms about the effect of media violence on children and youth for years.  It’s clearly time to take action, because the cause and effect is real, in fact this report highlights that the strength of the association between media violence and aggressive behavior is greater than the association between lead ingestion and lower IQ, condom nonuse and sexually acquired HIV, and nearly as strong as smoking and lung cancer!  I know I for one regularly talk to my sons about not smoking, have open lines of communication about safe sex, and certainly have removed any lead that I know about.

So how come violent media still fills our children’s televisions, computers, video game players and ipods?

In this season of checking our kids’ candy for poison and washing our hands after every contact … how about adding “turn off recreational violence” to that list?  It’s a children’s health issue.

Every parent and teacher should read this report, you can get it right here.  Read it.  Pass it on.  Let’s help the pediatricians spread the word and pass on a less violent world to our kids.

Author, Jenny Buck, Development Director of the National Institute on Media and the Family and mother of 2 teenage sons.