Greetings! According to a recent study of 1,178 children in the US, almost 9 percent of child gamers are pathologically or clinically "addicted" to playing video games.
However, 23 percent of youth say that they have felt "addicted to video games," with about one-third of males and a little more than one in 10 females reporting the sensation, according to the survey by Harris Interactive.
Forty-four percent of the youth 8 to 18 also reported their friends are addicted to video games, the survey said. The average child 8 to 12 plays 13 hours of video games per week, while teens age 13 to 18 year play 14 hours of video games per week, according to the survey.
These statistics raise some interesting questions. While the majority of kids who play video games don’t become addicted, what does it say about our culture when one third of our boys have felt addicted to video games? How do video games and other stimulating products prepare our kids for the future? What child, after the excitement of 14 hours of video games each week, doesn’t get bored when faced with “spending time with grandma”, or some other activity that doesn’t provide intense stimulation?
Furthermore, Japanese researchers found that playing computer games stunted the development of the frontal lobe of the brain in teenagers, which is a crucial part of developing impulse control. The tendency to lose control is not due to children absorbing the aggression involved in the computer game itself, as previous researchers have suggested, but rather to the damage done by stunting the developing mind. The full article can be accessed here...
I don’t know about you, but when it comes to decreasing the chances of my kids’ developing as well as they can, I don’t like to take any chances. I don’t like to allow my own denial to impact their development—socially, physically, or any other way.
Letting your kids play video games for hours each week? Their brains only have one chance to develop.
Can you really live with that?
Warmly,
Mark Brandenburg
Mark Brandenburg MA, CPCC
mark@eqnow.org
www.markbrandenburg.com
www.eqnow.org
Phone (+1) 651-766-9976
"Helping Men Succeed"
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Re: your crazy, playing
Re: your crazy, playing video
The word “your” should be “you're.” You are probably trying to combine two separate words and not attempting to denote second person ownership. The word "I" should be capitalized when used as a first person pronoun. The text, "i am in 1st year university" is not proper English.
I wonder if meeting requirements to complete a level in a game, and meeting requirements to complete (even with an "A") a level or class in school is truly indicative of intelligence.
I played too many games before. I realized that fundamentally, my entire time was spent fulfilling basic "yes" or "no" statements in logic sequences in the computer program. I found no tangible reward, and though I may have learned a small amount of history or of other subjects, my time would have been better used and more purposeful in studying those topics independently. Above all, be honest with yourself.
your crazy, playing video
your crazy, playing video games does nothing to your brain. i am in 1st year university, i play video games more than 13 hours a week and i get straight A's in school. i know many students who play video games and get straight A's also. that report is ridiculous.
You might want to quote your
You might want to quote your source with these statistics. I'm not contesting their validity, it would just be nice in case someone wanted to use those statistics in a report or research paper (I being one such person).
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