I want to to give the question a different view. I suggest that every cartoon not produced in the child's homeland may have negative influence on the futures socialization : reason here is the cartoon producers ideologies behind the actions of actors or heroes. If the children repeat the actions in their environment, there is good chance that some those action are not accepted or seen even as a taboo in the society that can cause behavior disorders ( here for I have some personal experiences ).

Therefore the parents must have a look at what their children are watching.

Attitude with siblings, everyday issues related to school life,peers and parents can be influenced by the content they watch.

Some popular areas of study are usually the impact of the violence in cartoons on children leading to aggression, anti-social behaviours, reinforcement of stereotypes and gender roles, lethargy, disturbances in sleeping patterns/nightmares, attention deficits, and sometimes even restricted or controlled imagination among children who watch either too many cartoons or watch shows with content inappropriate to their age.

One line of investigation may be: What constitutes proper parental guidance of watching cartoons? Is it the time spent watching cartoons the most important indicator of 'parental guidance' or is it more important to monitor the type of content?

I guess its important to monitor the type of content they are watching. Age appropriate content should be selected by parents.

I guess I am suggesting that time spent watching content may be a proxy measure for parental guidance. That is, if children watch 8 hours of cartoons a day, it is highly likely that the type of content is not being monitored very closely. Similarly, children that watch 30 minutes a day probably are watching content that is highly monitored. I would suspect that parental guidance/monitoring of content would be strongly, inversely correlated with time spent in front of the television.

Parents monitoring may be practiced in developed countries but in pakistan where literacy rate is not high mostly parents dont know even if there is any rating system that exists for foriegn content, so it should be controlled by higher authorites and policies should be made related to the transmission of foriegn entertainment content aimed at children. I am working on this project and i need articles and essays on content analysis of children entertainment.

There are many psychological disorders are being witnessed in society. Those venues must be explored.

There should be some kind of awareness raising programs for parents to help them understand that how they can monitor their children. Moreover parents should control time children spent on TV. If a child is heavy viewer then he will be more influenced by characters and violence in cartoon shows.

I want to to give the question a different view. I suggest that every cartoon not produced in the child's homeland may have negative influence on the futures socialization : reason here is the cartoon producers ideologies behind the actions of actors or heroes. If the children repeat the actions in their environment, there is good chance that some those action are not accepted or seen even as a taboo in the society that can cause behavior disorders ( here for I have some personal experiences ).

Therefore the parents must have a look at what their children are watching.

I totally agree with Ehssan. As a parent of young children and not just a media student, its clear that these cartoons especially those from other countries are having an adverse affect on the socialization of children. One relatively recent phenomenon in Pakistan is that of English and Japanese content that has been translated into Hindi. Although, on the surface Urdu and Hindi sound alike there are many fundamental differences which unfortunately for us are not understood by our children. This needs to be looked into.

Question: Have parents enough time or are they willing to sacrifice their free time to explain kids what is wrong? Or do they put their kids in front of TV just to get rid of them?

Also explore this phenomenon under supervision of parents.

If I may - I think there is little evidence to suggest that watching cartoons can have adverse effects in terms of development - for we both in USA and Australia - watch cartoons and have watched cartoons (i.e. Disney) to date. It is difficult to find a variance in terms of how much it can account for developmental concerns in terms of cartoons and while they are other more salient pro-social, sharing and care giving behaviours all around children all the time. Having said this Bobo Doll experiements do suggest more than watching - a saliency in the stimuli and in terms of how it is modelled and presented can have an influence but again to what extent this has a developmental concern longitudinally needs to be investigated - as saliency over time is likely to decrease. Many years ago I wrote a Chapter on this very same topic - now I can't find that to forward it to you - I argued that while TV, Social Media and Social Modelling can have immediate saliency and can influence incidental and episodic behaviours - so what extent these are likely to be remain a developmental concern lacks proper evidence over time and across culture and over age and gender - in this we not only need to know parental role but the kind of parenting and their relationship with children in terms of attachment - child temper...etc.

Dear Attia

i think cartoons can be one of the factors in personality development of the children... Children are exposed to all kinds of content on media and they get maximum influence from their environment..100% check by parents is sometimes not possible however it can be done for the children under 5

In this we must conceptualize personality development in developmental terms in relation to age - as implied earlier developmental framework is needed to position cartoon, toys, TA's. . Etc. .. and it is not necessarily parents but the kind of parents is necessary to consider