A recent study shows that children aged between 7 and 11 spend too much time watching TV or playing video games. How do you think this problem influence the children, their families and society? What measures should be taken to solve this problem?

Nowadays, TV programmes and video games are so popular that many children can easily get access to them in daily basis. According to a recent study, the screen time is considerably increased in 7 - 11 years old children. From my point of view, this is not a good sign for none of children themselves, their family and the society as a whole.

Excessive screen time has negative impacts in all aspects. As a primary school student, those children should spent more time on their academic and outdoor activities with their peers and family. Staring at the screen for a long time could cause eye problems such as myopia for a children at such young age. Also this could make the family relationship not close as it supposed to be, as the result of lacking of quality time spent together. Another concern is about the contents of such TV programmes and video games, many of which contain enormous violent and pornographic materials. Those would set bad examples for this younger generation and then lead to bad influence to the society in the coming decades.

There are several ways we can deal with this problem. Since children at this age usually lack sufficient power of self control, parents are responsible to set strict rules for their own children regarding the screen time. One hour should be a reasonable value, and parents themselves should also be a role model on this by spending more time on other activities with their children instead of sitting in front of a big screen together. For instance, reading would be a perfect alternatives. Governments should also set strict regulations on the content of public medias, programmes aiming for children should not contain any scene that could mislead children to wrong behaviour. Parents should also make sure their children should not be able to get access to those medias that are inappropriate for children.

In conclusion, rich screen media can bring joy to children, but over using it can cause many other side effects on individuals, families and even societies. There are certain measures must be taken to avoid such consequences.