Media affecting child development

Believe it or not but the Media has an exponential affect on the way a child grows up. In most cases a child is raised (in recent years) using some type of media at minimal, everyday. In fact, an American child from ages 8-18 spends ad least six hours and twenty-one minutes on average using media everyday (Statistics). Furthermore, Statistics say that by the age of 18 a child will have seen 200,000 acts of violence including 18,000 murders. Could you say that all this excessive media use could result in a higher death rate in the U.S.? Is the media that influential? In my opinion it is, but Id say its not entirely the reason for violence past a certain age. When a child is past the certain age of knowing whats right and what is wrong than I believe he or she should know mimicking or re-enacting scenes from a violent show or movie will result in consequential repercussions. Micheal Rich strongly believes that " the connection between watching violence on television and aggressive behavior, is that the correlation is stronger than those linking calcium with bone density and passive smoke with lung cancer.” Micheal Rich also mentions that if you were to watch a violent show than a upsetting situation were to happen to you, your more likely to have an outburst or act of aggressive toward others. When I think of influential media that effects children I visual video games more so than Television. A young boy could be playing Mortal Kombat (Gory Violent Video  game) for a couple of hours than meet up with his friends and tries to perform some acrobats he so easily used in the video game. On march 20th 2001 a 12 year old boy body slammed his baby sister 6 years of age to death because he was imitating a wrestling move he saw on television. This one story out of many others appealed to me the most because of the age boundaries and how the boy "accidentally" killed his sister. The boy was way above the age to know what's right and wrong, which leads me to say he was sentenced to life in jail. Accidental or not that wrestling show clearly influenced that 12 year old boy to perform violence on his sister and if he hadn't seen the show maybe the 6 year old girl would still be alive. I believe to prevent these type of violent occurrences parents should have the sole responsibility to make sure they know what their children are being exposed to, especially when it comes to any sort of media. Certain ages reveal certain privileges and responsibilities and its the parents job to determine that fact.