A Distinguished Child Psychiatrist Explains How Scooby Doo Is Ruining My Child

Violence in the media and it’s effect on young people has long been a cultural hot topic. We’ve heard about “shoot em up” video games, graphic song lyrics, vicious horror movies, and how all of these things make impressionable teens more immune to violence. Parents have revolted against things like Grand Theft Auto. We’ve demanded “Explicit Content” warnings on Eminem CDs. Now, children’s medical professionals are asking that we consider one more problem area that needs our attention. It has nothing to do with teenagers. And don’t worry, there’s no blood involved. The newest target in the effort to control media exposure to violence goes after a much more innocuous threat: cartoons.

Dr. George Drinka has an upcoming book about the media’s influence on children called, “When The Media Is The Parent.” When his publicist emailed me about the work, one sentence jumped out at me pretty quickly. It said that Dr. Drinka would be happy to talk with me about the ill-effects of television shows like Loony Toons, Spongebob, and Scooby Doo.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. The ill-effects of Scooby Doo? My daughter has a Mystery Machine in her toy room. She watches the classic cartoons frequently, as well as more recent versions. She knows every character’s catch phrase and uses them on a daily basis. We love some Scooy Doo in this household. I just couldn’t let a slam on Mystery Incorporated go without some defense. So Dr. Drinka and I agreed to sit down and talk about the so-called danger of this violent media for my 4-year-old daughter.

Obviously not being a very good debater, I laid all my cards on the table from the beginning. “Listen, my little girl and I watch Scooby Doo pretty frequently. She loves it. How is Scooby hurting us?”

Dr. Drinka immediately understood my defensiveness. “I watched Scooby Doo with my daughter when she was little too,” he told me. “But looking back, she had some trouble sleeping. New studies say that it could be because of violent shows like this before bed. There could have been other factors too, but there’s new research that shows a causal link between sleep problems and violent cartoons.”

One of those studies that Dr. Drinka is referring to appeared in August’s edition of Pediatrics. While not pointing fingers at the specific violent shows used, the study clearly showed a link between cartoons that show physical comedy and problems for young people getting to bed. He explained, “I think what’s really interesting is that parents are caught unawares because parents think of these things as comic. For kids it’s not a joke in the way that it is for adults. Cartoons are more realistic. Think about it, when they draw a human being, it looks like a cartoon character.”

The research Dr. Drinka is citing and his personal experience with these issues is that violent imagery, even in cartoon form, can lead to anxiety in children. That’s what is leading to the sleep problems. However, I just couldn’t help citing my personal experience on how Scooby Doo helped my daughter get over a little of her monster anxiety.

See, before my daughter began watching Scooby Doo, we had a little something called “Monster Spray” kept safely on her night stand. It’s a scented water that we can spray in her closet and under her bed to keep away the monsters. It was a way to deal with a pretty common childhood fear of something creepy lurking around the corner to get you. Once my daughter got familiar with Scooby and the gang, the monster spray was no longer necessary. We talked about how something that was scary at the beginning of the show ended up being less frightening than it seemed. We talked about the good guys winning and the bad guys going to jail. She saw that what seemed to be monsters weren’t real.

In that way, this supposedly violent show ended up helping my daughter. After all, it shows a group of kids conquering things that are scary. Couldn’t that be empowering for children?

Dr. Drinka conceded that my daughter and I had managed to turn the show into a positive. But he warned that not all kids are able to make those connections when they watch cartoons. What’s more, they probably don’t have parents sitting next to them, talking through the situation. Dr. Drinka warned that,” TV as babysitter,” was still the most common occurrence, not family movie night. “You have to talk about volume and content.”

Of course, the whole world has been talking about the extreme exposure to screens that children are facing. “Kids are spending 5 or 7, even up to 10 hours a day exposed to media. It’s more time than they spend at school. The drowns out the positive messages that parents might give,” he tells me. It’s the topic of Dr. Drinka’s book, and he has some theories about why screen time is becoming increasingly influential. “With a lot of kids, you have divorce, you have fewer siblings, you have parents who don’t feel safe in their neighborhoods so the kids are trapped indoors, you have parents moving away from extended families. Suddenly, kids rely on the media. Media becomes very important in running the household.”

Oh, and there’s one more cause for this retreat to machine-controlled young people. You might have already guessed it. “When more and more mothers are in the workplace constantly, the kids are without their mothers. That’s a fact,” Dr. Drinka told me. He constrasted my situation, where I work from home and have a husband by my side, and said that obviously mine wasn’t the norm.

But I still couldn’t help but feel like all of these things, from cartoons to family structure, were red herrings for a bigger problem. I told the doctor, “But there are always examples like mine. There are kids who find positive messages in Scooby Doo or who have divorced parents that are dedicated and co-parent and work together or whose working mothers still make their kids a priority. Doesn’t it seem like the problems come from a lack of involved and thoughtful parenting, not necessarily the television show or the divorce? Is ‘Don’t watch Scooby Doo,’ just easier to sell?”

Dr. Drinka agreed, “Suggesting that kids just stop watching Scooby Doo is too simple. It’s a complicated issue. The studies deal with large demographic groups. We can’t know the specific. And that’s why we need more introspection like in my book.”

I’m interested to see how the book accounts for people like me, because I don’t think I’ve been convinced to leave Scoob and the gang behind.