Bobo Doll - Marisela Corona

I have to agree with John as far as finding it interesting that the experiment uses a toy that needs to be hit and bounced around and have it be treated like a punching bag. After viewing the video my first thought was “Why are they using a toy that springs back upright when it is hit? Maybe the children are seeing it as a game?”

However, the overall idea is that children imitate what adults do and say. Therefore, this video demonstrates, to a degree, how children learn from modeled behavior. Children, adolescents, and baby’s are always watching and listening to how adults act; they learn by mimicking. So, as Julie states, if adults display violent behavior then children are obviously going to do the same and believe that it is acceptable behavior. Since parents are the strongest role model a child has, everything that they do, screaming at the car that cuts them off in traffic, lying to a friend to get out of dinner plans, smoking, drinking or speaking negatively of others, and even the parents prejudices, will end up being mimicked by children---children take it all in.

Because children take it all in I also wonder how children in this experiment would have reacted to the Bobo doll if the video they had been exposed to was part of a scene in a movie, television show, cartoon, etc. After all, children’s frame of reference on how to operate is limited to their frame of exposure: peers, parents, teachers, adults in their lives, characters in a book, and television. All of these are their examples of how to act or react. An example here would be the television show Jack Ass. I’ve have listen to many stories on how children, teenagers, and even grown men have attempted stunts that are done on the show and brag about the injuries they acquired. How about the Columbine incident? The teenagers that killed 12 students and one teacher were said to have been influenced by numerous hours of violent video games and since the teenagers came from secure home environments with active parental influence, then video games such as Doom were a point of reference to their violent behaviors (a more known video game to me is Grand Theft Auto. This video game promotes prostitution, theft, and violent behaviors towards cops). Although I like the Matrix I want to include it because I once read how some teenagers were arrested for trying to play out their role as “The One” and started acting violently. My final example and maybe I’m getting off topic but I keep going back to how Jamie Lynn Spears and Juno influenced 17 girls to get pregnant; this to me is sickening because I tend to think of role models in a positive term, as people who enrich our lives and teach us important lessons and values. But in truth, role models work both ways, showing good and bad behaviors that kids pick up on.

To wrap this up I want to include a couple of statistics that I came across with. These statistics are a form of reference on how children are affected by how their role models act and to support Smitty’s statement of “how our life experiences make us who we are” and to further agree with Matt that we as future counselors need to “look closer at a person and not rush to judgment.”

1. The American Psychological Association reports that over 3.3 million children are exposed to violence against their mothers and also report that a child’s exposure to the father abusing the mother is the strongest risk fact for transmitting violent behavior from one generation to the next.

2. The Illinois Coalition Against Domestic Violence reports that in a survey of 6,000 American families found that 50 percent of men who assault their wives, also abuse their children and 80 to 90 percent of children living in homes where there is domestic violence are aware of the violence.

3. Bergam, Larsen and Mueller state in “Changing Spectrum of Serious Child Abuse” that 80 percent of child fatalities within the family are attributable to fathers.

4. Rosenbaum and O’Leary state in “Children: The Unintended Victims of Marital Violence” that male children who witness the abuse of mothers by fathers are more likely to become men who batter in adulthood than those male children from homes free of violence.