Television

Abstract

Television was immediately a concern of adults in the 1950s, who saw what a great influence it would be in the lives of children and families. Articles that expressed anxiety about the content (often violent), the time that young people spent watching, and the ways that children seemed to become less imaginative, spending less time outdoors, were common. Multiple Senate Hearings about Juvenile Delinquency looked at television violence in the 1950s and 1960s, as children frequently watched westerns and crime shows that were not intended for youth. In the 1970s, critics regularly talked about the addictive nature of television, often citing a statistic that children would have spent more time watching television than attending school by the time they graduated from high school.