Many Children are exposed to different levels of violence whether it is through television, video games, or comic books. In Gerard Jones’s “Violent Media is Good for Kids” he expresses his feeling towards how violence can allow children to partake in activities they would normally be scared of and to be able to overcome their daily fears. Many parents feel that if children are exposed to violence at a young age it can harm how they behave in the future; however, Jones feels that comics and other forms of violence can actually help a child grow to become a stronger person. Jones is able to convince the reader that violence is beneficial to a child’s developmental process. With Gerard Jones’s use of personal experiences, expert opinions, and his ability to look at both side and explicate each one has really given him the essence of a convincing argument.
Gerard Jones uses his life experiences to help support some of his ideas. He starts off his essay talking about his own childhood stating “I withdrew into passivity and loneliness. My parents, not trusting the violent world of the late 1960s, built a wall between me and the crudest elements of American pop culture. Then the Incredible Hulk smashed through it.” With the use of his personal experiences he is able to give a first hand experience to the reader of a child that had been restricted from anything violent by his parents and now that he his able to use violence to benefit himself really shows the reader that there has been cases when children have benefited from violence.
Another life experience he presents is when he became a father and seeing his son go through the same troubles he had when he was a child. When explaining how he noticed the struggles that his son was going through he said:
In the first grade, his friends started climbing a tree at school. But he was afraid: of falling, of the centipedes crawling on the trunk, of sharp branches, of his friends' derision. I took my cue from his own...