INSTEAD OF… Watching TV, Chatting on the Computer, Texting, or Talking on the Phone, Try taking a walk, playing outside with friends, or spend time with family. You could also take up a hobby such as drawing, painting, or cooking. Try out a new sport such as soccer, softball, volleyball, or basketball.

Parental oversight – Be Educated

• Teens who watch more than 1 hour of TV each day are four times more likely than other teens to commit aggressive acts in adulthood.
• In a study of 3rd and 4th graders, reducing TV and video game consumption to less than 1 hour a day can decrease verbal aggression by 50% and physical aggression by 40%.
• 72% of teens think watching TV with a lot of sexual content influences their peers' behavior somewhat or a lot.
• Sexual content appears in 64% of TV all programs. Programs with sexual content average 4.4 scenes per hour.
• Only 15% of programs that contain sexual content include messages about risks like sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) or unplanned pregnancy.
• On average, music videos contain 93 sexual situations per hour, including 11 "hard core" scenes depicting behavior such as intercourse and oral sex.
• An average of one food commercial is shown every five minutes during Saturday morning cartoons.
• Advertisers spent more than $10 billion targeting children and youth though TV ads, coupons, contests, public relations promotions and packaging designed for children.
• Kids 8-18 spend 44.5 hours per week watching TV, playing video games, IMing, etc.2This is more time than they spend with their parents (17 hours) or at school (30 hours).
• 53% of parents of children 8-18 years old have no rules about TV.
• By age 18, a teenager will have seen 350,000 commercials; 100,000 may be advertisements for beer.

The negative effects of violence in the media

• Teens who watch more than 1 hour of TV each day are four times more likely than other teens to commit aggressive acts in adulthood.
• In a study of 3rd and 4th graders, reducing TV and video game consumption to less than 1 hour a day can decrease verbal aggression by 50% and physical aggression by 40%.
• In 2000, the percentage of kids between the ages of 8-18, only 6% of them has been cyber bullied. That number has jumped to 58% in the past 8 years.
• Nearly 2 out of 3 TV programs contained violence; averaging 6 violent acts per hour.
• There are more than twice as many violent incidents in children's programming than in other types of programming.

Negative effects the media has on body image

• In a survey of girls 9 and 10 years old, 40% have tried to lose weight, according to an ongoing study funded by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (USA Today, 1996).
• One author reports that at age thirteen, 53% of American girls are "unhappy with their bodies." This grows to 78% by the time girls reach seventeen (Brumberg, 1997).
• Teen-age girls who viewed commercials depicting women who modeled the unrealistically thin-ideal type of beauty caused adolescent girls to feel less confident, more angry and more dissatisfied with their weight and appearance (Hargreaves, 2002).
• http://teens.lovetoknow.com/The_Effects_Media_Has_on_Teenagers_Body_Image

Negative effects the media has on health

• Kids 8-18 spend 44.5 hours per week watching TV, playing video games, IMing, etc. This is more time than they spend with their parents (17 hours) or at school
  (30 hours).
• 63% of kids 8-18 live in homes where the TV is on during most meals.
• 80% of the TV commercials that kids see each year are for fast food, candy, cereal and toys.
• 36% of kids six and younger have a TV in their bedroom5 , compared to 68% of kids 8-18.
• A preschooler's risk of obesity jumps 6% for every hour of TV watched per day, 31% if the TV is in their bedroom.