My son’s social isolation prompted me to reconsider video games, and some dated research about their influence.
My husband and I were eating out with our son, Eddie, who was then 2, when a couple came in with a young boy wearing headphones and staring at an iPad as he walked. For the entire meal, the boy was glued to his screen while his parents chatted amicably as if he wasn’t there.We vowed not to buy our son an electronic device until he’s 30. And video games, one of the main reasons children want these devices, would be verboten.
Video games can also be addictive, so addictive that the World Health Organization included a condition called “gaming disorder” in its International Classification of Diseases; the American Psychiatric Association considers it a condition warranting further study. And one 2020 study published intracked 385 adolescents over six years to find that 28 percent of the gamers were prone to increased levels of depression, aggression, shyness and anxiety at the end of that period.
It took a while for Eddie to make friends at school. Now, in fourth grade, he’s finally forged some bonds, mostly through sports. But in their free time, all his pals play video games, and my son does not. He felt like an outsider before finding these friends, and now my ban is inadvertently keeping him isolated — not just from his classmates but from the rest of modern society, it seems.
“Don’t do to him what my parents did to me,” my friend said. Her parents forbade her from watching TV and eating sugar, prohibitions that left her clueless about all kinds of cultural references. “They made me feel like a weirdo,” she said. Bowman also notes that game research has evolved. For the first 20 years, studies were focused on the potential harms, like addiction and aggression. Today, games are viewed for their art, their teaching potential and their ability to make people feel things. It’s not that video games have no ill effects. But the myopic focus on those ill effects now seems overblown and dated, he says.
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