#kidgamers

To understand this article, we are going to look at a linked article by  Timothy J. Legg, PhD, PMHNP-BC which explains what aggressive behavior is in kids.

Aggression in children can be caused by several factors. These can include:

poor relationship skills

underlying health conditions

stress or frustration

Your child might imitate aggressive or violent behavior that they see in their daily life. They may receive attention for it from family members, teachers, or peers. You can accidentally encourage it by ignoring or rewarding their aggressive behavior. -Linked Here

Rachel Barclay discusses in this article the negatives as well as positives that come from a child gaming. The first part of the article is the negative which talks about how kids who play violent video games are more at risk for aggressive behavior (see above for definition.)  With this she sites a number of different studies, with links provided that elaborate the reasoning why violent video games lead to this kind of behavior.

“We know that violence in general ... is associated with mental health problems. We also know, given brain research, that our brain sometimes doesn’t distinguish between what’s real and what we see on TV.” — Susan Tortolero, University of Texas

The next section highlights the positive of the gaming community. Though this area lacks a lot of information compared to the negative section. it still talks about how children can learn and use what they learn from the video game and bring that into their every day life.

The final sections, the verdict on this topic.

There’s a chicken-and-egg question here — do violent video games cause aggression, or do kids who are predisposed to aggression later in life also play more violent video games?

Through her research and the research of others there seems to be no definitive answer on this topic. There seems to be a large amount of people that agree with the negative while others the positive. 

“The reality is that we have probably both exaggerated the negative and positive impact of video games on children,” Ferguson said. “This is typical of the ‘moral panic’ that follows the introduction of new media into society, which can cause even scholars, at least in the short term, to [make] exaggerated claims. I think all of us can remember media-based moral panics from our own childhoods … from rock music … to comic books in the 1950s, to Harry Potter, to rap music, to Dungeons and Dragons, etc. In the end, whether violent or non-violent, they are merely fun, thoughtful, new forms of 'art' that don’t really have any more impact than books, music or other forms of art.”