Cartoons and Children

 

One of the most important part of being a child is to sit in the mornings and watch cartoons and laugh at the silly pranks and jokes our favorite cartoon characters perform. But when does watching cartoons actually become a problematic concern for children. And what do cartoons these days actually promote  that Lehman see's as a problem for young children?

When I think about cartoons and how they teach young children I think some recent cartoons are inappropriate for handling race and stereotypes in television. Cartoons are suppose to consume time to keep kids out of trouble for a couple of hours, not teach kids how to curse or use race or sex as nuances for laughable purpose. This gets at the real issue that parents need to teach their kids the importance of what they see on TV and filter their minds. I think organizations like the Civil Rights Movement were right to boycott cartoons because they taught young children that blacks and other minorities were just silly, lazy, violent creatures, and children pick up on these ideas and carry them and spread them to friends and then they form wrong ideas about certain social class groups. The trend that's new in media is the use of sex in cartoons and how its the new norm, but this is just as bad as using overly rated racial stereotypes in cartoons. The problem is that this stuff sells not a lot but its want the audience wants and needs to see to make a show a hit. So it will be interesting to see where cartoons head in the future and what  problems they might encounter for their young audiences.