This principle is probably no great surprise to anyone, yet parents sometimes forget that very alert eyes and ears arc frequently tuned to them. Through the modeling process a child learns values, attitudes, gestures, vocabulary – and had habits. Consider the simple ritual of eating. If a child spends an average of an hour a day eating with parents, that child has a daily opportunity to imitate them in the ways they eat, types of food eaten, tone of conversation, speed, food sequence. If you calculate the total number of those eating hours during the child’s first twelve years, you will find that it amounts to 4,351) hours! Imagine how much a child must learn from parents after that many hours of observation! It’s staggering when we consider the number of hours children actually spend observing and imitating the full range of adult behavior.

Young adults often deny that they are like their parents. Certainly specific behavior might be quite different. Yet psychologists have found that the best single indicator of what a person will be like as an adult is what the parent’s similar religious beliefs. (Yes, we can think of exceptions too!)

During the growing years, children are exposed to a tremendous variety of ‘models’ they can imitate, including their parents. Playmates (particularly older and well-liked ones), school teachers, and heroes/heroines on TV, all serve as role models. It is really interesting to compare estimates of the total number of hours available (up to twelve years) to be influenced by those four categories of models.

Parents are clearly the most powerful childhood models, because they are such a dominant part of the young child’s world. But the older children get, the stronger other influences become.

Research studies have shown that children readily imitate models who have high status and prestige and who are seen to be rewarded for what they do. Television personalities, superstars, and fantasy characters certainly have status, are often hero-worshipped by children, and are almost always rewarded for what they demonstrate on the screen.

There has been much debate and concern about television violence and its effects on children. We don’t claim that watching a murder scene will necessarily cause an increase in the murder rate. It’s not that simple. Yet the question must be raised: just what are we teaching children with television? Our time estimate allowed the average child three hours per day watching television, but the estimates for American children are as high as seven hours per day!

Nobody wants children to imitate television violence, yet according to one government study (US National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence), during an average TV viewing week the program contained over 600 acts of violence. More than half the major characters (the models) inflicted violence on someone else. Violence also occurred in 95 per cent of the televised cartoons. Such violence is often caused by ‘good guys’ to ‘bad guys’ so it fits within our concepts of good versus evil. Can anyone realistically maintain that twelve years of exposure to this will have no adverse effect upon children? At the very least it makes us less sensitive to the pain and suffering of others.