How video games affect Children

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How video games affect children

Most parents treat video games as a sinful indulgence. They feel that playing video games is acceptable as long as their children actively practices moderation. Nonetheless, parents usually view playing video games as waste of time and not meaningful or beneficial for their children at all. These parents are under the impression that gaming will indubitably result in their children succumbing to addiction and developing undesirable personality traits such as laziness and apathy. Violence displayed in children is also often conveniently blamed on the existence of violent video games.  People have thrown about all manner of accusations at video games being a bad influence, but not many has relevant evidence to show for it. Henceforth, it is important for us to know the impact or effects of playing video games on our children so as to not be susceptible to false information.

Advantages

1. Perseverance and Willpower

When a player fails to complete a stage or repeatedly dies to an in-game obstacle, he may decide to persevere despite his repeated failures until he succeeds and clears the stage eventually. In doing so, he is displaying perseverance and strong willpower, which are important qualities for humans to overcome their own failures in the physical world and succeed.

2. Situational Awareness and reflex training

It is no secret that the United States Army has released a series of games entitled ‘America’s Army’ and other simulation games that trains soldiers to stay situationally aware during combat. Video gamers will have to make the correct decision in a limited window of time where they might be killed or damaged in the video game scenario if they do not make the decision on time. This primes their brains to make crucial and quick decisions in a hostile or stressful setting.

3. Accurate simulations of real-life scenarios and skills

Video games such as Microsoft Flight Simulator replicate the conditions of flying a plane in the real world. THese simulations are rendered as realistic as possible and will be great training for a child to see if hes interested or a natural prodigy.

4. Linguistic Development

Children whom are still learning English can benefit greatly from playing video games. Via watching cut scenes and listening to characters interacting in English, children can learn new vocabulary and improve their reading comprehension skills.

5. Improved accuracy

As mentioned, fast-paced video games in the action, shooting or fighting genres are reported to help us make swift and accurate decisions.

6. Navigation Skills

Most video games have a map of some sort to help guide players around their vast lands. The video gamer thus has to learn to read the in-game maps and remember where the crucial coordinates are. Thus, this could help with their real-life map reading skills as well.

Disadvantages

1. Social isolationism

A child who spends too much time playing video games are not spending enough time interacting with family and friends. Online friends are unreliable at best, and often disappear from each other’s’ lives when they mature and become busy with adult responsibilities. Moreover, children who spend excessive amounts of time on playing video games may neglect their academics and extra-curricular activities.

2. Addiction

Video games can be highly addictive to kids. As such, when parents and teachers try to stop them from playing, the kids will become extremely frustrated and anxious. MRI scans have revealed that video games can have similar effects as drugs and alcohol do on children’s brains.

3. Violence

Although there does not exist sufficient evidence to link violence in video games to actual violent tendencies in humans, the glorifying of violence in video games might teach children that violence is positive as they often reward the gamer for killing or maiming certain antagonists.

4. Possible sleep deprivation

Excessive screen time can help aggravate sleep problems such as insomnia. Children often spend time thinking about their video game progress and become really excitable. This prevents them from being able to fall asleep until they have forgotten about the game’s events.

In conclusion, video games are now extremely popular among children and even adults alike. It is the parents’ responsibly to maximize the positive consequences their children can acquire from gaming by allowing them to only play games that are suitable for their age while ensuring that they are unable to acquire adult or mature-rated video games. It is also important for parents themselves to be exposed to video games so that they could have the option of joining their children in playing video games. This can help them to share a common interest and possibly improve their relationship.