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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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
April 2019
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