What Do Children Learn From Cartoons?

A few weeks ago, my mom’s friend cameover with her little son for breakfast. At first, the little boy was very shy and he didn’t say a word, butafter a while he started talking. What was shocking to me is that he wasspeaking in formal Arabic, which is barely used in casual life nowadays. Iasked his mom how did that happen, and she told me that she was worried abouther son not speaking at the proper age and she felt he didn’t understand herand her husband when they talked to him. But once, she said, her son was veryangry trying to tell his mom to give him a certain toy, and she was acting asif she didn’t know which toy he wanted to encourage him to speak. Luckily hesaid something. He screamed: (la oreed hatheh), which means no I want that onein formal Arabic. The mom was shocked to hear him speak in formal Arabic. Fromthat point, whenever she wanted to communicate with her son she used formalArabic. She told me her son was very happy to finally be able to understand andcommunicate with them.

According to her, her son learnedformal Arabic from Cartoons on TV, which are dubbed in formal Arabic most ofthe time. It is said that the family is the most important agent of socialization, but this case made me think whether this statement is true ornot. The kid learned the language from television instead of his family! May bethis happened because of the new common family structure; the mother and thefather are working for most of the day, whereas the son or the daughter, beforethey’re eligible to go to school, spend most of their time in front of TV withthe nanny who doesn’t speak Arabic. Moreover, I’ve heard many stories aboutlittle children learning the language of the nanny, which made them more ableto communicate better with her that with their own parents.

Other than language, cartoons canteach children a lot of things, like role taking. Children learn a lot abouthow to be a boy or a girl in the society from cartoons. For example, in Disneymovies most females are portrayed with longeyelashes, pink cheeks, red lips, and a very tiny waist. On the other hand,males are portrayed as tall, with wide shoulders, and big biceps.

Thisportrayal reflects the perfect shape of females and males expected in thesociety. Girls wear make up and want to be skinny, and boys want to go to thegym to build muscles. Moreover, females are associated with cleaning andsewing, whereas males are associated with jobs like mining, and competitionwith other males for either status or a possible mate.

Furthermore, somecartoons like Tom & Jerry, and Bugs Bunny, include a lot of violent material, which might affect the way children play with each other.

This suggests the need for parentsto supervise and try to control what their young children watch, becausewithout this supervision and interference of the parents, children mightinternalize the behaviors and values they watch in these cartoons, and this canbe very problematic, especially if parent consider these behaviors and valuesas inappropriate.