Video Games For Kids
Video Game Addiction, Kids Need Healthy Balance
Kids just want to have fu-un! There’s a fine line between fun and addiction…We all are tucked away on our computers in this now “Social-anti-social” land of Internet and video games. Keeping the balance between healthy playtime, social interaction, chores and school work for our children is a job in itself. Parents are busy working to keep the mortgage paid and food on the table while the hand held babysitters are taking over. There has to be a referee in the world of kids and their Video games, to keep their physical, emotional and social health intact. Before the virtual world, kids used to play outdoors. Now more and more they are spending their afternoons and or every free moment in some cases, indoors playing video games. The lack of social interaction with others can affect your kids in a negative way. Sure they may know how to slay an animated foe, but do they know how to work out a conflict in the real world? Video games are a fun distraction but are not meant to replace social interaction with friends and family. The more time spent playing video games, the less time there will be to cultivate the social skills needed for real life situations. Watch the amount of time that your kids spend playing video games. For boys, it seems that playing video games can get to their “inner happy place” with their buddies on-line. They discuss video game graphics, strategies and scores as a way to begin a conversation and get to know each other. To them, video games are the cool thing to do without the awkwrdness of real interaction, on-line is much easier. In a study of 22 subjects, 11 females and 11 males, each of them played a video game while being imaged by an MRI. The game was simple, the computer screen had a vertical line down the middle, the “wall”, and then balls moved toward the wall from the left or right. The object is to click the balls on one side to move the wall toward that side. The press release describes the findings:
After analyzing the imaging data for the entire group, the researchers found that the participants showed activation in the brain’s mesocorticolimbic center, the region typically associated with reward and addiction. Male brains, however, showed much greater activation, and the amount of activation was correlated with how much territory they gained. (This wasn’t the case with the females.) Three structures within the reward circuit – the nucleus accumbens, amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex – were also shown to influence each other much more in males than in the female participants. And the better connected this circuit was, the better males performed in the game. It depends upon how you define addiction, and also it is important to recognize that there are different types of addiction. Drugs cause physiological addiction (by saturating receptors causing down regulation, for example). Behaviors that activate the reward system strongly have the potential to cause psychological addiction – which is still neurologically based, just with a different mechanism. That is the whole point of the reward centers in the brain – to reinforce certain behaviors, to create high levels of motivation to continue behaviors that have a survival advantage. Certain modern behaviors, like video games, trick this system by virtually simulating behaviors that in our primitive evolutionary environment had a survival advantage – like aggressively seeking to expand one’s territory, for example. These are the same structures that are involved with other forms of addiction, including heroine and cocaine. This is not surprising – people play video games because they are fun, they make them feel good, and this generally equates to activation of the reward centers of the brain [Novell, steven. Neurologica blog. N.p.: n.p., n.d. Print].
7 Signs of addiction:
Symptom 1 - Unable to meet responsibilities of relationships or at home, school or work.
Symptom 2 - Compulsive preoccupation, meaning one spends a great deal of time thinking about the substance or behavior
Symptom 3 - Has tried but failed to stop using the substance or end the behavior. Things spin out of control.
Symptom 4 - Engages in the behavior or substance use knowing it is dangerous or in dangerous situations such as driving.
Symptom 5 - Because of the addiction, one stops activities or hobbies that were fun or enjoyable.
Symptom 6 - There is a need to increase the amount and frequency of the behavior or substance to achieve the desired felling or affect.
Symptom 7 - Ones life has become centered around the addiction, isolation from others occurs.
We don’t want to rain on the video game parade. Every human being needs a happy distraction from school, work or family issues that real life offers. Video games are not all bad and can be a learning tool, but anything used in an extreme manner can become an addiction. Limiting a childs use of the virtual world may make the child very frustrated if not replaced with positive activities. If your child is showing addictive behavior, seek professional help before it gets out of control. Parents can make sure there is a healthy balance of social interaction and video game time with their children. Just being aware of the tell tale signs can catch an addiction before it settles deep into the childs brain. Rewarding your child with love and reassurance is just as good as killing the bad guy five hundred times, in fact it builds their self-esteem and character in a constructive way that lasts a lifetime.
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October 4, 2011 4:31 am 
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