Video Games Effects On Children

Many parents in today’s society are not unfamiliar with seeing their children with glazed over eyes, sitting at a computer screen. It breaks their heart to see their children being drawn from reality into a violent and inappropriate place for a child to be. These games are not only distancing loving parents from their children; the games may actually be making kids more aggressive. Videogames can lead to violence by putting the player under a mountain of stress, distancing the player from a good source of guidance, and desensitizing the player to violence.
To start, video games can be a huge cause of stress in the lives of some people. Stress is proven to be directly connected to aggression. This factual evidence can be traced back to scientists …show more content…
In the topic of raising children, Laura Davies says that child development is very dependent on discipline:
A huge part of discipline and development is understanding consequences. Video games like Grand Theft Auto turn the consequences into positives. You kill a person on the side of the road and get points; you’re rewarded. They [children] are not affected by reading a violent book the same way they are from a video game that is visually violent and that they actually participate in and that rewards them for violent acts. (qtd. Gardner …show more content…
They provide instant feedback; good or bad determined on how well you perform in the game. They can even help develop and strengthen synapses in the brain (Gentile). While all these are true, if applied to a violent video game, these findings can be catastrophic. Instead of being rewarded for doing good deeds, they are rewarded for violent behavior, murder, robbery, and other such things. Additionally, It has been proven that playing games has many health benefits. Video games can help improve one’s contrast sensitivity, which helps night drivers distinguish shadows from one another. They also help memory storage, and in turn, learning skills (Gentile). However, video games have also been linked to obesity, attention problems, video game addiction, and of course, violent behavior. Another prominent argument is that there simply isn’t a sufficient amount of evidence to prove that is does indeed cause violence. They say that most studies have been inconclusive due to the fact that researchers cannot put children in any violent circumstances for which to test this theory (Gardner). However, many researchers have used alternative methods to test their theory. As previously stated, Bushman’s experiment provided sufficient evidence, as did Hungarian scientists who tested a stress theory on rats and found that stress did indeed lead to aggression. For these reasons and the one’s previously stated in the essay are solid