Slashdot Mirror
Video Games Seriously Harmful to Children?
Coltron writes "In an article published by AskDrSears.com, medical professionals go over step by detailed step why video games are so terrible for a child's developmental Health." From the article: "A green label suggests the game is suitable for all ages. Yellow or red labels signal the video may contain violence, sexual content, or bad language. While these ratings are a start, preview the 'E' or 'ALL' ratings anyway, since the level of violence the raters consider harmless may not be acceptable in your home." This is a bad sign for the gaming industry if a medical site is beginning to take the anti-gaming studies this seriously.
I can remember the instant I became desensitized to violence. It was the scene in Robocop where the lead character is getting shot all to shit in the warehouse pre-transformation.
I was pretty advanced for a kid my age, so my parents had allowed me monitored access to media considered generally inappropriate for my age group. I usually ingested it just fine. I was really into sci-fi and was looking forward to seeing a movie about an ass kicking robot.
I nearly cried during that scene because I couldn't determine if that could happen without you passing out or dying. All the other violent scenes I had witnessed resulted in very quick deaths. The idea that the pain and damage could add up like that was a little too much.
Background: My degree is in Comp. Sci, and I took a handful of Psych classes. So no, I'm not an expert.
However, if you go and look up the developmental stages of the human being, which are increasingly well documented, I do not find fears that computers may have odd effects a silly one.
Children are not little adults. This is all the more true for toddlers, and even more true for babies. While it is true that there are some things that there is evidence that babies believe/know that are surprisingly sophisticated moral judgements (such as who hit who, and which end of that relationship is scary, at a very young age), it is also true that babies have to learn things like "if you pour all the liquid from one glass into another glass of a different shape, you have the same amount of liquid."
Babies are effectively aliens, if you haven't carefully studied them, and your internal cognition models of other normal adult humans do not apply to them very much, if at all.
I am concerned that during these formative early years (let's call it 0-3 for concreteness), excessive electronic interference could be legitimately damaging on a number of cognitive levels. I could also be wrong. Studying this topic would be very difficult to do ethically.
Of particular concern to me is the learning of the value of effort; I am concerned that a young child given very normal electronic toys that produce entire songs at the press of a button are teaching that miniscule amounts of effort can "produce" that much result. I'd much rather see a kid play with physical toys (like blocks, legos, etc, as age-appropriate) that have a much more normal effort/effect reward.
I think that there's little danger in "playing it safe"; I am concerned without proof about these things, but I do have existential evidence that not being exposed to such things at 0-3 does not result in a adult incapable of understanding electronics. As such, should I ever become a parent one of my plans is to ban any such toys for the first few years in favor of more classic, physical toys, from which one can learn about the physical world much more effectively. (Lest I sound like a Nazi, my kids would probably end up with a computer at the same time as anyone else's; remember, I'm talking 0-3-ish here.)