A CO-RELATION STUDY TO ASSESS PARENTAL KNOWLEDGE AND ATTITUDE REGARDING THE IMPACT OF TELEVISION ON CHILDREN IN SELECTED AREA KANPUR, U.P

Abstract

Today's Children will be tomorrow's responsible citizen of the country. Entertainment is an essential part of life, by this we feel tension free, relaxed, energetic and having a positive attitude towards life. Games plays an important role for the all round development of the children's personality especially outdoor games but Now a days children are adopting habits of playing indoor games and also entertaining themselves by using various electronic devices as we know one of them is television. There are various programmes such as various kids’ channels, cartoon shows, video games etc. being watched by the children. Directly or indirectly these programs affect behaviour of the children in positive and negative ways. That’s why it is needed that parents should have a look for types of programmes seen by children, how long a child is watching a program, how it is affecting child habits/ behaviour etc. Later on, these negative impacts will create health issues/behaviour problems such as obesity, aggressive behaviour, lack of concentration etc. Child who watch television for 10 hours or more per week are less skilled at reading and are less successful in school as compared to children who watch television for less than 10 hours per week. The American academy of paediatrics makes the following recommendations regarding television viewing should not exceed one to two hours of quality programming daily and children younger than two years old should not watch television.1 That is why researchers took this topic to highlight the attitude and knowledge of parents about the impact of television on their Children's behaviour. A co-relational study conducted to assess parental knowledge and attitude regarding the impact of television on children in selected area at Kanpur (U.P). A descriptive cross-sectional survey approach was used, sample size was 100 parents selected by convenient sampling for this study. Self-structured knowledge questionnaire was used to assess the knowledge of parents, and attitude of parents was assessed by Likert scale. The study shows that among 100 parents 8% of them had poor knowledge, 36% average knowledge, 50% good knowledge, 6% very good knowledge about impact of television on children. The study shown the positive attitude 84%, negative attitude 16% on impact of television on children. The correlation value shows that positive correlation between knowledge and attitude score of parents. There was no significant association between knowledge score with their demographic variables and significant association seen between attitude score with types of family, educational status of parents, income of parents and number of children. There was no significant association between attitude score with age of parents and religion. KEYWORDS: Impact, Television, Attitude, Parental Knowledge,