Television and Content Censorship: The Impact of Violent Content on the Developmental Stages in the Personality of the Nigerian Child

Abstract

Erik Erikson’s theorization of the psychosocial developmental stages of humans, reveal the fragility of children with special attention to their biological and psychosocial characterization. The adolescent age is the period where the child is adventurous, curious and eager to explore, as he becomes fascinated with the media and begins to try out behaviours and lifestyles of his opinion leaders. The Nigerian child is more or less enthralled about foreign movies, shows and musical videos characterized by violence, thuggery, gangsterism, drug abuse, obscenity, and even promiscuity which are sometimes too much information for him to handle given his developing, immature and fragile psychology which makes it easy for these contents to influence his behaviour in every stage of his personality development as he is exposed to them. This Too Much Information (TMI) seems to be a product of media imperialism as local television contents in Nigeria, camouflaged in the concept of Americanisation and westernisation and devoid of censorship, are persistently consumed by adolescents in Nigeria. Hinged on Erikson’s theory of personality developmental stages in a child and Bandura’s social learning theory, this paper employs secondary data and a critical document analysis of previous research works to objectively opine and conclude that exposure to too much information (violent contents) on television can influence the psychosocial development of the personality of the Nigerian child.