Sunday, October 30, 2011

Teenagers' Obsession With Computer Games

By Owen Jones


Many parents are concerned concerning the amount of time that their children are wasting playing computer games. It is simple to become engrossed in a computer game and the competition to become one of the first amongst one's peers to finish the quest is a big inducement.

The difficulty may come when children begin to abandon their normal healthy routines so that they can play games.

Attending school is like going to work but with long term consequences. If you lose your job, you can find another one (in theory), but if you miss your education you will never really get to where you ought to have been. Staying up too late or not doing homework to create more time for playing games is a significant error of judgment.

Children can become, well, to get frank, most children are, deceptive and by the time they get to be teenagers they are normally pretty good at it. They have learned enough social skills and know enough about their parents to be able to hoodwink them quite easily.

This makes it more problematic for the parent who is trying to find out whether their teenager has a difficulty with gaming addiction or gaming obsession. We all like to think that our offspring would not lie to us, yet we all know that they do.

Numerous doctors reckon it is best to double figures given by a patient: how many pints of beer do you drink a week? Ten. Read twenty. How much candy do you eat a week? Eight ounces. Understand sixteen ounces. How many hours do you play computer games a week? Thirty. Understand sixty.

Do not forget that anything over forty is a working week. They are throwing away a full-time wage to play games and all adults know how much the pattern of the day their job governs the rest of their day. If your child is putting this amount of time into playing video games, something else must be suffering.

It is almost certainly grades at the moment, but later it could become health or the acquisition of social skills, friends and contacts, all of which help someone to get a better career.

If you think that the child is spending too much time at the gaming console and you notice that grades or social life are falling off, then it is the time to restrict gaming hours or it could become worse, leading to temper tantrums, which could be mild to severe.

If you think that it is not good for children to watch a lot of violence on TV because it can have an effect on their character, then bear in mind that most video games involve intense violence, rapid responses and shooting to kill.

This is quite an amount of hyperactivity for the brain if you compare it to listening to some Brahms or Bach or watching a Shakespearean play.

If you believe that your child has got the balance of input into its head out of kilter, then it is better to react sooner instead of later.




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