Peter B. Neubauer, who passed away at 94 last month, was one of the first psychiatrists who raised the alarm about the negative effects it could have on children to witness violence on television.
In the 70s he held a famous debate at Columbia University in which he warned that television could lead children to have nightmares and emotional problems.
Unfortunately and as it happens numerous times in history (and even today), they made fun of him. Another scholar, Bennett Cerf, defended television to death as an intellectual tonic. But Neubauer insisted: for children between four and seven years, seeing violence "under water, on water, on the ground and in the air" could only have a negative influence on their emotional development.
He worked as director of the Child Development Center for the Services of the Jewish Family and Childhood Council in Manhattan, where he dedicated himself to psychoanalyzing dozens of preteens until he retired in 1985.
In his studies he realized that children increasingly used more frequently toy guns to entertain himself, and his theory is that television drove them to it. Their goal was to try to understand why they became aggressive and if there was any way to educate them in another direction. He was also one of the first to analyze extraordinary family situations such as the effect on children of having only a mother or only a father.
During the eighties he focused on analyzing the effects of horror movies on the psyche of infants. His conclusion was that children who had an emotionally healthy family life had no problem differentiating fantasy from reality. But he also discovered that those who suffered at home connected the images of the films to those of his own life.
Therefore, by raising our children well we can balance the negative effects of external elements, but just in case, we should ward off our children from all kinds of visual violence (TV, video games, movies) like the plague.
