KARACHI, June 28: Exposure of children to scenes of violence, natural disasters, catastrophic events and crime reports on television leads to stress, anxiety and fear among children leaving far reaching impacts on their personality.

These views were expressed at a seminar on "Mind and media", organized by the Endeavour-A Youth Forum at the Aga Khan University Auditorium. The speakers said that research had shown that children and adolescent were prone to imitate what they saw on media. Effects could be evident immediately or surface a year later, they added.

Teachers' Development Centre Director Prof Abbas Hussain said that children through media got aware about certain facts of life mysteries, contradictions, tragedies and violence, which were not considered suitable for them to know.

Television programmes and films, he said, were mostly full of violence and tragic scenes, which were being watched in every home through cable television creating social problems for people with no exception to children.

Prof Abbas Hussain said, "All secrets of adolescence like social, sexual and physical matters are watched by people of all age groups including children, consequently childhood innocence is impossible to sustain."

He suggested that parents should watch television with their children to check on such programmes and time of watching television should be limited. Dr Ihsanullah Saeed, a renowned psychiatrist, said that parents should see what children were watching in order to minimize the effects of such programmes.

"Television should not be used as a baby-sitter," he said and recommended removal of television sets from bedrooms, monitoring of the websites they visit, setting of time limitation and finding alternative activities for them would be very helpful in reducing negative effects on personality of children.

He suggested to observe "Break: Free of TV" week in Pakistan in order to promote healthy activities and spending more time with families. Referring to a case of an eight-year-old girl, he said, she could not sleep and study for days after watching the images of corpses, after a bomb blast in Karachi, recently aired on a private television channel.

Among others, Aga Khan Education Foundation General Manager Wasif Rizvi and Endeavour-A Youth Forum President Sohail Mohammad Ali spoke at the seminar. -PPI