Video Games, Social, And Social And Emotional Wellbeing Of Adolescents

With social media growing and growing into a mass of accounts and profiles and different groups of people and clubs and websites and other things, what adolescents do on social media is something that many parents worry about. Not every parent is at ease with the fact that their child/teenager is out in open water; one young human being surrounded by millions of other human beings who are younger, the same age, or older than them. The article “Teenage social media butterflies may not be such a bad idea” takes a look at teenagers ' use of social media. Social media is a very important tool, allowing people to connect or continue their relationships without

In Melissa Healy’s article, published on May 18, 2010, Los Angeles Times, “Teenage Social Media Butterflies May Not Be Such a Bad Idea,” she argues that social media and their social skills may not be such a catastrophe after all and that teenagers who use social media are psychologically healthiest. Healy supports this claim by first describing how, according to the research found by Amori Yee Mikami, social networking sites are mostly used to, not to converse with strangers online, but to interact with friends they already know and said, “So people of well-adjusted teens may have little to worry about regarding the way their children behave when using social media. It’s likely to be similarly positive behavior.” Then, she makes a connection

Social networks online affect our everyday lives even if we care not to admit it. According to Adler, studies of adolescent friendship groups, from middle and junior high school to high school have found that teenagers cluster along a multidimensional scale into groups composed accordingly to individuals’ social types and interests (Adler & Adler, 1998). This socialization is true amongst teenagers using social network sites. There is an popular clique located atop of the hierarchy of friendship groups and descends in prestige and power (Adler & Adler, 1998). Teenagers are getting bullied on the SNSs. The parents need to ask their children how their day was in cyber land.

In the article, “Let Kids Run Wild Online,” author of It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens and principal researcher at Microsoft Research Danah Boyd explains how social media is a necessary tool in a teen’s social development. In the age of overprotective parents or “helicopter parents,” as Boyd calls them, teens are “desperate to carve out a space of their own,” and being online may be their only output (Boyd). Some parents feel the need to “protect” their kids from the dangers of being online, but they are approaching it in a way that doesn’t allow the kids to learn from any mistakes they may approach.

Patti M. Valkenburg and Jochen Peter have developed an extensive research on internet usage of teenagers. “Social Consequences of the Internet for Adolescents” is the article written reporting this research (Valkenburg and Jochen Peter 1). The result of the research and point of the article is to discuss the consequences social media has on the socialization and overall well-being of adolescents. The studies done today represent opposite results from studies done in the 1990’s. Valkenburg and Peter explain why this opposition has occurred over time.

Since video games are a relatively new medium of artistic expression and entertainment, not much is known about the effects of continual exposure to them, especially at a young age. The effects of violent media on the psyche of kids and adolescents has been a pressing concern for many years now, as stated in a study conducted by Tortolero et al. (2014), where it is observed that most other studies done on the subject of video games were mainly focused on aggression (p.609). In the current attempt to identify a relationship between video games and the attitudes of youths, the researchers have decided to instead focus on levels of depressive symptoms and the amount of time spent playing video games through a cross-sectional analysis (Tortolero et al., p.609). The researchers have focused on the branch of psychology focused on mental health, clinical psychology (King, 2014, p.16), and the psychological problems associated with prolonged exposure to violent video games, specifically in preadolescents. The study was meant to observe the levels of depressive symptoms in children who played violent video games using the Major Depressive Disorder Scale of the DISC Predictive Scales to identify these symptoms which included lack of pleasure, lack of interest in activities, concentration difficulties, low energy, low self-worth, and suicidal ideation (Tortelo et al., 2014, p.610-611).

“many parents and teachers complain about the short attention spans of their kids; but those same kids seem to have more than adequate attention spans when it comes to gaming” (249). This is one common method of encouraging children to learn and to also stay focused while they learn. However, in essence, online gaming is still filled with many distractions, which can significantly alter the brains of the users, causing them to think more fragmented and non-linearly. As mentioned by Carr before, similarly to surfing the Web, while playing video games “we focus intensively on the medium itself, on the flickering screen, but we’re distracted by the medium’s rapid-fire delivery of competing messages and stimuli” (Carr 118). Therefore, while video games do captivate the user’s attention and they can also help and improve certain cognitive and brain functions, they necessarily do not improve attention spans, in fact, they actually harm them.

Are video games having a negative effect on today’s adolescents? For most teens, video games can be a fun way to escape reality. How do video games impact us? Are video games having a positive or a negative effect on today’s adolescents? Spending too much time playing video games leads to escalating rates of teen violence, obesity and declining grades. Violence, which also includes bullying, among teens has been on the rise for years, Watch the local evening news and you will most likely hear about a teen shooting or stabbing. Obesity among teens is also rising at an alarming rate. Instead of going outside, many teens choose to spend their day indoors with their game consoler. Some students play video games instead of doing their homework or studying. This results in a drop in grades and possibly dropping out of school. The fact is, video games have a negative impact on teens. They can affect behaviour, school grades and lifestyle.

Video games in the 21st century have transformed from friendly competing into guns, explosions, and major violence. Video games are getting away with more violence every year and the games are becoming more extreme. The consistence and severity of violence is at an all-time high leading the most popular games in the gaming community to have a ‘mature’ rating due to the considerable amount of violence involved. For example, one of the highest selling video games of all time grossing one billion its first weekend, Grand Theft Auto 5, contains gang violence, nudity, and obscene language (Thier 2014). Although the extreme violence is rated accordingly for certain ages, parents often purchase these games for their kids not knowing what is

According to the Entertainment Software Rating Board in 2010, sixty percent of households play video games (Video Game Ind.). It is not surprising that in the technical age we live in, people are playing video games more than ever. Inevitably, this brings into question the violent nature of some popular video games and their potentially dangerous and harmful impact on young children. “Video game addiction is without a doubt, becoming this century’s most increasingly worrisome epidemic comparable even to drug and alcohol abuse” (MAVAV). Many believe violent games are a main contributing cause to criminal and/or aggressive behavior in children. They want to go as far as banning the games that have violence in them. In my opinion, parents must take responsibility of their children’s education, as well as playtime activities, and pay attention to the degree of violence and aggressiveness in the specific games they purchase. “…there’s no evidence that this leads to violent behavior in real life. F.B.I. data shows that youth violence continues to decline; it is now at its lowest in years…” (Olson, Perverse). I believe video games can be beneficial to the mind, body, and soul.

Video games have come a long way since first becoming popular in the 1970s. Electronic gaming has become one of the most common forms of entertainment among kids today. The games marketed to younger audiences are becoming less family friendly then when they were originally introduced. While many games are rated to be played by those eighteen and older many parents allow their children to take part in such games. From running around with a gun shooting everything in sight to surviving a nuclear apocalypse, games adolescents are playing are encouraging violent behaviors. Children who are frequently playing video games are also less likely to be successful in real world communication skills which can lead to depression. When a child is only reacting with people they’ve never met in online gaming lobbies they are likely to be less confident talking to a person in the same room. Prolonged exposure to violent video games desensitizes kids to violence, make them more aggressive, and affect their mental health.

In the past, when a child was bored they went outside to play, they created new games, or they played with friends. But, for the past three decades, video games and other digital media have been persuading many adolescents and children to spend the majority of their time playing them. Video games seem to satisfy children’s natural need to interact socially, however more often than not, they lead to social isolation. Overexposure to digital media, such as video games is detrimental to the health and function of a child’s brain in the areas of empathy, impulse control, and social interaction.

In this day and age when you ask a child what they would like as a gift they can give you a list of a million things and this list changes every day. It should come as no surprise though with the way the toy market aggressively advertises towards children. They base the continuation of certain television shows based upon the sales of certain products, they create video games based around toys to generate interest on two fronts, and they even use food as a way to get toy names out. But what does that really do for our children? Kids from impoverish families know that they won’t be able to ever get money for the latest game console that all the other kids are excited for. They won’t don’t get to live the fantasy that the commercial projects.

Kahne, et al (2008) statically did an experiment to examine the effect of video games on youth’s social and communal activities. The results showed that the youth that have ever played some social video games had more social and political capability than people who never played social video games. Among young gamers, 63% people have heard or seen “people becoming mean and more aggressive while playing violent games”, 49% people have heard or seen “people becoming hateful, racist and violent while playing violent games” and more people, 78% people, have witnessed “people becoming more generous and helping while playing”.

The purpose of this research is to determine if aggressive behavior amongst the adolescent stem from playing violent video games. In 1976, the first violent video game “Death Race” was released but, never held accountable for wrong doings of the youths of that time era. It has only been in recent years that society blames the violence within these games for the negative behaviors of youths. The graphics within these games have consistently improved over that past few decades and now seem just as realistic as life itself. Although, video games are more realistic than decades before, they are only one minute factor in determining ones behavior. When determining if violent video games is a factor of aggressive behavior , one needs to also needs to take into consideration how long that youth is playing a particular game, is that youth being supervised as he or she is playing that particular game, what type of social setting is involved, and etc. From bullying to high school shootings, violent video games have been held responsible for numerous wrong doings by youths.