- Share This Post
- Pin It
- 0
- 7
-
Sparkle (0)
The headline isn't any real shocker: "Kids' Excess Video Gaming Tied to Anxiety" doesn't even feel like news, at first blush. Surely there's anxiety on the part of the parents trying to keep their kids from spending every waking moment glued to the XBox, and obviously kids who are anxious may find gaming preferable to interacting with other kids. Obvious, right?
But this latest study -- following kids from as young as second grade or as old as eighth grade for two years -- suggests one important new piece of data. Rather than dependence on gaming being a symptom or result of anxiety, it claims to actually cause it:
While previous studies described factors tied to pathological video gaming, the latest research provides data on risk factors for becoming a pathological gamer, how long it lasts, what the outcomes are and whether it is the main problem or simply a symptom.
"Although children who are depressed may retreat into gaming, the gaming increases the depression," said the psychologists and social workers who authored the study.
"Many clinics assume that children may be depressed or anxious and therefore retreat into games as a coping strategy. Our data demonstrate that this assumption is overly simplistic."
Anyone who's ever engaged in scientific study or even read a study knows that correlation doesn't equal causation, and finding greater anxiety in gamers doesn't mean that gaming causes it. But apparently this study cites a causal relationship, pointing to their findings that those children falling within their criteria as "pathological" gamers showed decreased levels of depression and anxiety if they stopped gaming.
On the New York Times' Well Blog, Roni Caryn Rabin details the gaming industry's outcry against this study (is anyone surprised that they're upset?), and also clarifies researcher Douglas Gentile's position:
Dr. Gentile suggested that teenagers who are experiencing problems may retreat into gaming, and that the gaming may, in turn, increase their depression and isolation. He says that parents should regulate their children’s use of video games and trust their instincts on what constitutes excessive use, something that his critics from the gaming industry also agree on.
Kate at dot.momming confesses to reading about this study and immediately wondering where her kids fell on this spectrum, but then noted that "excessive gaming" in the study was considered an average of 31+ hours/week. Excessive, right? Kate's breakdown is sobering:
What does 31 hours look like? Well, nearly a full-time job. Even the group playing fewer hours could still hold a part-time job.
If kids are gaming every day after they come home from school, they're putting in more than 6 hours daily. Say they get home at 3 p.m., -- does this mean they are gaming until 9 p.m.? What about homework, dinner, any sort of sports or other activities? To fit those it too, they're probably gaming until midnight.
So I'm guessing that -- for most of us -- looking at it that way causes us to heave a little sigh of relief. My kids certainly aren't playing video games anywhere near that much. In fact, my kids are only allowed video games on the weekends, and after considering 30+ hours/week as the reality for some kids, letting them play for two or three hours in a row suddenly seems like not a very big deal.
There was a little memory niggling in the back of my head while I read this, though. Wasn't it just last year that video games were being heralded as therapeutic? Maybe you remember when a study out of the University of Oxford showed that playing Tetris can decrease PTSD? This was a very big deal, just about a year ago. Subjects were shown disturbing images, and then one group did nothing afterward, while the other group played Tetris. The Tetris players had fewer flashbacks, and there was much speculation on how this finding could be applied with children who'd experienced traumatic events. I remember my interest being piqued by this study because my son tends to go into some weird zoned-out state whenever allowed to play his Nintendo DS (which is why I don't allow it very often; it kind of freaks me out), and sometimes, yes, it seems to calm him down when nothing else will. (My daughter doesn't have the
