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Nursery Rhymes more violent than TV

A team of researchers say that children are exposed to far more violent incidents from their favourite nursery rhymes than from an average evening watching TV.

The tongue-in-cheek study examined 25 popular rhymes including Humpty Dumpty and Jack and Jill which portray violent incidents such as Humpty cracking his head in a fall and Jack and Jill falling down a hill.

The researchers admit their study was not entirely serious but they say it does make the point that blaming television for increasing levels of violence is too simplistic.

They studied data from Ofcom on the number of violent incidents shown on television between 5.30 pm and 9pm over a two week period. They found that half of the TV programmes showed violence compared with 44 per cent of nursery rhymes but said that the levels of accidental and aggressive violence were twice as high in the nursery rhymes as they were on TV.

Overall, there were almost five violent scenes per hour of viewing on TV - but there were more than 52 per hour of listening to nursery rhymes. The researchers read the nursery rhymes to a toddler, but said it was difficult to gauge anything from the child's reaction.

Although nursery rhymes were less graphic than TV, imagination could be more powerful, they argued.

Television was twice as likely to show or mention the result of the violence, compared with the nursery rhymes.

"This allows the child, having heard a rhyme, to make their own image and conclusion as to the effects and outcome of the episode. At times this may be more disturbing than having the outcome spelled out, as children often over interpret the results of such acts."

Brian Harrison-Jennings, general secretary of the Association of Educational Psychologists, told BBC News it was too simplistic to blame television alone for problem behaviour but he doubted whether nursery rhymes were a significant factor.

He said, "There is a certain element of fear and frightening behaviour in nursery rhymes, but the key is the context in which the violence is mediated to the child.

"Nursery rhymes are usually read to a child when they are sitting in a comfortable position with their parent's arm around them on the sofa, and the parent makes a joke of it.

"In that way, the child is able to enjoy the fear and excitement of the nursery rhyme while being able to distinguish between pretend violence and real violence. This is not always the case with television, where a child may be watching frightening scenes alone.

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