You and I have talked about parental controls. Those kinds of things, so we have to be. We as parents may never be as savvy as our kids. This generation and the generation just proceeding have been raised with all manner of technology that we don't have very much familiarity with and I know that I use my computer kind of by rote because I've memorized certain things to do. I do not have any kind of intrinsic draw or feeling about my technology that I use every day, whereas, my belief is, my daughter sees it as, my 20 year old daughter sees it as an extension of herself. - [Voiceover] Absolutely check this website
- [Voiceover] So it's just really kind of frightening and I just think that what's helpful is when we're all aware and educated, when we think about these things. - [Voiceover] Absolutely, so let's take a quick look at culture and technology changes. There's the Beatles on the left with one slot machine, all four of them dropping a coin in and the other children on the right, who as we both observed, will sometimes be sitting in the same room texting each other. Let me make sure I didn't skip a slide. I did not, so let's see if, oops, this slide is not there. We're gonna talk about the slide that, for some reason, didn't get in there. - [Voiceover] Well, one of the things about gaming that I read in the research is that the actual average age of a gamer who games a lot is 34, which really surprised me. And the average number of years adult gamers have been playing computer or video games is 12. And then the number of households in the U.S. that play video games is 67%, so that's almost 70% of the families in the United States play video games. So I thought that was really interesting. In 2010 the average gamer spent eight hours a week playing video games and about 60% were male and about 40% were female, so I just thought that those were some really interesting statistics and I also ran across a research article and there was a doctor from Harvard, Michael Rich, and he talks about a national study published in Psychological Science in 2009 that reported that 12% of boys and 8% of girls who play video games exhibit pathological patterns of play and fit the DSM category of addiction. The study also showed that pathological gamers are twice as likely to have ADHD or ADD, and he said, Dr. Rich said, "Rarely do I see pathological video game "playing in a child who doesn't have "an underlying issue, such as anxiety, depression, "oppositional defiant disorder, ADD or who falls "within the autism spectrum," which really kind of surprised me and he goes on to say that for kids who are on the spectrum of autism, they have difficulty reading clues from the environment, like facial expressions and things like that, so video games actually simplify those signals and make the outcomes much more predictable. So video games have a much more controlled and limited vocabulary of symbols to learn, symbols that don't rely on human expression and human faces and body language are the hardest things for kids on the autism spectrum to learn to read. In fact, skill building video games can actually be positive for these kids. There are actually a lot of wonderful apps and games that are specifically designed to help kids on the autism spectrum.
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And I don't want to go into a lot of information about it because we're really not doing a webinar on marijuana right now. But marijuana is really the number one problem right now. And as far as if we have kids that have a concurrent mental health disorder, it's definitely conduct disorder. That's our second and then the one right behind that is generally attention deficit hyperactivity disorder with or without hyperactivity and the second drug of choice is alcohol because alcohol is still enormously prevalent and it's really easy to get, so that's what kinda cracks me up too is when they talk about legalizing marijuana is that we're taking steps to make sure that kids can't get their hands on it because you have to be 21 in order to, well, that's bunk. All you have to do is look at our current legal drugs, which are alcohol and tobacco and most of our kids smoke too, that's not their presenting problem. Generally, you're not gonna get into as much trouble with tobacco products as you are with other drugs or alcohol and so I didn't list that although that really should have gone on the list.
- [Voiceover] Tobacco. - [Voiceover] Tobacco, yeah, so anyway It's just really interesting the difference in opinion and attitude and approach around the whole marijuana issue, so anyway, lest we digress, let's chat a little bit about gamers and the internet. - [Voiceover] Thank you, that was so useful. I think we could spend and hour talking about what you keep noticing walking in the door. I appreciate that, Denise. Funny little poster on the left that I found on the internet that I'm a gamer, not because I don't have a life, but because I choose to have many, that just scares me. Because I know people who are on the verge of mental illness or who are already mentally ill or who are, and by mental illness I mean anything from depression all the way up to schizophrenia, If that's their habit of choice and are more and more isolated, I am really scared about what's going on in their basements. On the other hand, I see absolutely nothing wrong with the picture on the right given appropriate boundaries. If we could get parents to do that, to spend a Sunday morning in their jammies playing a video game with their son, that would be awesome! They would probably have improved relations and all kinds of better family style. But what do you hear about instead? - [Voiceover] It's interesting, this is Denise E. It's interesting because the gamers that we have at Quest that really do spend a lot of time playing video games, really it's much more of an isolative activity, it's not usually an activity that the whole family is engaging in, especially when they spend hours and hours doing it and the research says that people that spend so many hours gaming have increased desensitization and so their tolerance increases, just like it does with drugs and alcohol. One of the scariest things that I've ever read about gaming is the couple in Korea who allowed their infant, their live infant to die from neglect, because they were too busy caring for an avatar infant in a video game. - [Voiceover] True story. - [Voiceover] It's really scary to me about how the internet world takes over people's brains. There's a journal called Nature and they did a study and they actually found that excessive gaming releases dopamine similar to what's observed after IV injection of stimulant drugs like amphetamines. So it's another area where we need to be really very careful about how much time we allow our children to spend playing video games. When we work with families at Quest, we work with parents about setting up consequences for negative behavior, boundaries around activities, we encourage people to only have their computers in an open area of the house. - [Voiceover] Or grandparents. They have a much higher rate of gambling. I think acculturation, what's accepted, the amount of time that parents have and that's probably the last bit of preaching that I wanna do today is there are numerous studies that will point out that having dinner together around the table once a week has a greater prevention rate for later on teenager and adult manifestation of drug, alcohol and other addictive behaviors than almost anything else. Just sitting around the table and having dinner together at least once a week. And I think this is the reverse of what that research is talking about.
When the parenting and the socialization and the love and the attention is lacking, they're gonna go looking for love in all the wrong places. So the last one, well the second to the last one, they usually play card games for money and the gambling activity that their most likely to have done in the past year is wager on sports. The number of children who are in the family, in my opinion, where sports is a significant social and recreational activity, if parents just knew to look for the signs and symptoms of their child wagering with their friends, with them, with others, turning into a compulsive gambling problem, that's it, that's the preventive message is know what the signs and symptoms are. The last piece that I wanna give you on the Oregon Youth and Parent Study is that adolescents have more naive attitudes towards gambling than their parents. And that has a lot to do with brain development as Denise E. has already pointed out, however, relatively high proportions of parents, regardless of whether or not they gamble, believe that gambling is a harmless activity. Let me just kinda emphasize that. If the parents believe that gambling is a harmless activity, that is gonna have an influence on what the child thinks. And that youth who gamble are unlikely to have problems with school and that youth gambling is not associated with alcohol or drug use. And we know differently, we know that these poor parents are uninformed and ignorant or they're naive, or they're in denial, or they're avoiding the truth. So education and prevention is gonna play a big role in changing that. - [Voiceover] Right and this is Denise E. and the article from Psychiatry Journal also pointed out it is so much easier for parents to see the signs and symptoms of a child using drugs or alcohol than it is for them to see the signs of a child who has difficulty with gambling, which offers fewer opportunities or less opportunity for parents to intervene when those issues are present, so they have to educate themselves on if your child is lying to them about where their money is going, borrows money and doesn't ever pay it back, starts stealing out of mom or dad's wallet, their little brother's piggy bank, those kinds of things. You have to know kind of what to look for so I think it's very helpful of parents who educate themselves. - [Voiceover] A little education goes a long way. I would like our next polling question to come up, question number four. Of what they actually are... oops, sorry, one more technical difficulty, do not drop your stuff on the floor while you're talking. Let's go ahead and broadcast the results now. - [Voiceover] Wow, that's actually pretty close. Marijuana is definitely the number one issue and it is more and more prevalent with Colorado and Washington legalizing marijuana. The message that adolescents are getting now is that marijuana is harmless, that it's a medicine, using that as an excuse, use. A lot of kids talk about how they can't wait to get a medical marijuana card because they've all heard how easy it is. Any sort of soft tissue complaint and you can get a medical marijuana card. The unfortunate piece in all of this is that what the research shows is that marijuana is just so detrimental to kids' brains. |
AuthorGeorge Evans is a teacher at High school, Literature tutor, translator and just a good father of 2 girls. George uses for his writings Robot Don essay checker. In his free time, George likes to visit new places, read interesting literature and play with his children. Archives
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