Child psychiatrist Michael Brody chairs AACAP’s Media Committee. “These first-person shooter games are very, very popular, and there’s a lot of research to show an increase in aggressive affect, thought and behavior while a child is playing these games,” he says. He adds that because most games are mobile now, parents have a harder time keeping an eye on content. Children also run the risk of meeting predatory strangers on collaborative games played over the internet. “Beyond the violence,” says Brody, “I’m concerned about the way these games displace other activities — reading, or playing with friends.”
Shoot-em-up blockbusters like “Grand Theft Auto” and “Call of Duty” aren’t the only digital media that parents need to watch out for. Studies have shown that infant learning videos — remember the “Baby Einstein” and “Brainy Baby” series? — actually delay language development in toddlers and babies. Evidence from this and other research led the American Academy of Pediatrics to recommend, in 1999, that children under the age of 2 should have no screen time whatsoever. For older children, the AAP suggests parents limit screen time to two hours a day.
Jane Healy is an educational psychologist and author of “Failure to Connect: How Computers Affect Our Children’s Minds—And What We Can Do About It.” Healy has serious concerns about the impact of all digital media on children. There’s no question, she says, that the neural connections created when kids play video games are different from those used for reading. “Basically, my concern — and others have said this as well — is that we’re losing the power of reflection and the power of sustained attention,” says Healy. “I would maintain that in many of the visual activities — online, on screens, on television — that it’s actually the programmer’s brain that’s doing most of the work. The child is responding, almost like a rat running in a maze. It may look fast and it may look clever, but it’s a stimulus type of response.”
Playing video games, she continues, “conditions the brain to respond to something exciting, and then to look around for something else that’s exciting. It’s not developing very deep uses of the human mind. The ability to problem-solve on a deeper level, the ability to take someone else’s point of view, to reflect on issues and topics and relationships — these are the things that I think meaningful reading encourages.”
In 2009, President Obama launched the Innovate to Educate campaign. The initiative is aimed at boosting students’ proficiencies in STEM subjects. One of the key elements of the program is the National STEM Video Game Challenge. “There’s some really powerful intellectual activity in the video-game community,” says Kumar Garg, senior advisor at the White House Office of Science and Technology. “And we’re finding this is a community that wants to make a difference.” As part of this initiative, game designers have begun building educational components into popular, commercial games. “Take a game like ‘Spore,’ which is all about making the next creature. What if ‘Spore’ also got kids excited about learning math and science?”
The Challenge also gives kids the chance to design original games of their own. Alan Gershenfeld, president of E-Line Media and a partner in the Challenge, finds this particularly exciting. “Designing games,” he says, “requires skills like systems-thinking, problem-solving, critical thinking, iterative design, creativity, and collaboration — and kids love it … My belief is that if we can tap into a natural passion that kids have, we can motivate them to want to learn subjects like math and science.”
Roger Altizer is a video-game advocate and a professor at the University of Utah. He thinks any risk video games might pose are far outweighed by the learning opportunities. At the most basic level, he says, a game is simply a logic problem — not unlike a word problem one would encounter in math class — with the capacity to stimulate the imagination.
“You know that expression, get lost in a book? Well, kids get lost in video games,” he says. “Because these games provide rich, exciting experiences. Kids create new rules for playing, they extend the storylines of games after they’ve finished playing, they even write their own stories about the games’ characters.
“There’s a concern that’s been around a long time about the effects of video games on children,” Altizer continues. “Are there good things that come out of media consumption, particularly interactive entertainment and video games? I think the answer is yes, and I think it’s a question that’s only just being asked. When Gutenberg invented the printing press, there were all sorts of questions about who should and who shouldn’t be reading. ‘Should women read? Should children be allowed to read?’ I guarantee there were people who said, ‘Reading is very bad for children. They won’t learn to be productive members of society because if they’re reading, they’re not working!’ Today, you have a new medium: video games. They’ve only been around for about 30 years, and we are having that same conversation.”
With the rising popularity of gaming and digital media showing no end, the question for parents becomes how to guide your child through it. Donald Shifrin is a pediatrician in Bellevue, Washington, and a member of the AAP’s Council on Communications and Media. “The difficulty we’re facing now is that we’re really in the beginning stages of a new paradigm. Is access to all this electronic media a good or bad thing? We can’t say. We can just say that it’s here, and it’s going to accelerate. One problem is that these devices are so immersive that youngsters become tethered to them and find it hard to give them up. Teens and their phones are a prime example.”
Shifrin states, “I’m concerned when I see a 1-year-old child coming in for a doctor’s appointment and when the child cries, his parent pulls out the iPhone to show him a video. I’m a bit worried these devices could become a default mechanism for pacifying youngsters. And recent research shows us that young children learn far better from a real, live person than from electronic devices.”
In the end, Hutton says, the conundrum rests more with parents than children. “The whole process of sitting down to read a book with a child takes time, it takes effort, it’s not glamorous — and increasingly, this sort of experience is outsourced to electronic gadgets. I do worry about the push to make kids do too much, too fast, and to be ‘smarter.’ The kids may be learning to push buttons, but some of the really important [benefits] one gets from reading — language, empathy, emotions—are perhaps being neglected.”
This article was originally published in the Spring 2013 issue of Brain World Magazine.
