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My latest TV segment on The Morning Show explored the huge spike in video gaming during the coronavirus, the long-term effects of being glued to the screen on a child’s brain, and how can parents set healthy boundaries.
Video games and brain development
Children’s brains, through adolescence, are considered “plastic”. As with other activities, video gaming alters a child’s short and long-term development in both good and bad ways.
The best way to explain this is that its similar to how food affects us. Healthy food has a good effect short and long term. Junk food may be ok in small doses but too much, long term has a bad effect.
Similarly, a child’s brain is effected by everything they do.
Good quality activities shape their brain in a good way. It stimulate neural pathways and the more of these the better long term for how our brain functions. Bad activities including activities that are passive, unstimulating, or stressful, affects their brain in other ways.
So when it comes to gaming, the game you choose is important.
The games that have a good effect on a child’s brain are games that I call “hard fun”. They’re fun but your brain has to work. Puzzle games, strategy games, problem solving games, dancing and rhythm games actually have a good effect on the brain and actually change it in ways that help it to function better.
At the other end are video games that don’t make your brain work. They may be passive, a child may know all the answers already so their brain is not working hard, or the game is stressful for the child either because of the game chat or because the content is too mature for the child to cope with.
Rise of passive viewing of video games
A big change in gaming is the rise of it as a spectator sport. Latest figures by Google show that in 2020, one hundred billion hours was spent watching gaming content on YouTube. You can travel to Neptune and back 475000 times in that time?
Most adults scratch their heads wondering how watching others game could possibly be interesting.
For children it’s much like watching their favourite sport star on the field. They enjoy the skill and the commentary that goes along with it. They watch the stars or just someone having a go at live streaming their game play- much like watching a singing competition on TV.
Parents Tips
There are no specific video game guidelines on when children can start to play them, but the guidelines we have on children and technology give important advice we can take from.
If a child is younger than 5 years and playing a video game, it should be good quality hard fun that makes their brain work. They shouldn’t be left alone to play it because we want to avoid using a device as a babysitter. Instead play with them.
As they get older and kids start school there’s lots of pressure on them to game, particularly for boys. Keep up with the hard fun idea but also make sure the games they play are age appropriate. Just like movies, video games have classifications and a 5 year old should not be playing an R rated game for 18 year olds, because just like movies there will be sex themes, drugs, criminal activity.
To shift your child out of unhealthy habits, the best place to start is to recognise if your child’s game play is passive or hard fun. If it’s mostly passive then it’s a good idea to encourage different kinds of games.
It’s also important to reduce how much time your child spend on their screen alone and to balance this out by introducing or reintroducing other interests
