Once to ev’ry man and nation
Comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of truth with falsehood,
For the good or evil side;
Some great cause, some great decision,
Off’ring each the bloom or blight,
And the choice goes by forever,
’Twixt that darkness and that light.
—James Russell Lowell, “Once to Every Man and Nation”
In case you need more persuasion to take action, this chapter covers additional research on the impact of media and violent video games on our children. Chapters 8 and 9 will provide the light at the end of the tunnel, offering you a solution you can easily implement in your community schools.
In considering widespread change, I want to make clear that nobody should be talking about book banning. Nobody should be infringing on the spoken word or the written word, and nobody should be telling adults what they can or cannot do. Nor does the research support the effectiveness of doing that.
The research does show that the bodies and minds of young children are not prepared to handle the visual imagery in violent video games, just as they aren’t prepared for sex, alcohol, or the responsibility of driving a car. Even the most ardent libertarian doesn’t object to laws that prevent predators from sharing sex, drugs, and alcohol with their children. The time has come for education and legislation that will protect our children from the makers of these games along these same lines.
Consider how people are remembered centuries after their deaths. Shakespeare, for example, is venerated for his creative work. No doubt that is how most of the entertainment industry would want to be remembered, but they are in danger of being remembered in the same vein as child abusers if the practice of selling these games to children continues. They still have time to be remembered as leaders who guided an industry to paths of creativity and responsible citizenship as well.
Far from being satisfied with merely laying blame at the industry’s doorstep, this book is focused on providing tools that any community can use to make a difference in the fight against the rising tide of violence in our society. Even beyond the impact you can have on your own children, we hope the information in the following chapters inspires you to expand the reach of your efforts throughout your community. Of course there’s an Off switch, and of course you have the power to control media consumption in your own home, but all of your efforts might be in vain if your neighbor’s child decides to bring a weapon to school in a period of desperation. In this instance, the best way to fight the power of the entertainment industry is through education.
Every parent wants the best for his or her child. And what’s right may not always be obvious. But the research demonstrates that the choices a parent makes about the media entertainment a child watches will affect that child’s entire life.
Initial studies show that fight-or-flight hormones can be flushed out of the child’s brain in a fairly short period. The data indicate that a kid afflicted by media violence can be “detoxed” in two or three days. If the video games are turned off, a profound difference takes place in that short span of time.1
Kids are achieving higher test scores and seeing improvements in both their behavior and overall health as a result of the Take the Challenge media detox program. These results indicate that before we put a kid on any drug for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or any other behavioral concerns, we should take him off the current drug first. And the current “drug” is TV, movie, and video game violence.
The American Academy of Pediatrics now recommends that doctors gather information from parents about how much time a child spends in front of the TV or playing video games as part of his or her wellness assessment. If a child has a behavioral problem, one of the first pieces of advice that pediatricians, school counselors, child psychologists, and educators can recommend is a TV detox. The parent keeps the child away from all TV, movies, and video games for one week.
We’ll talk a lot more about possible remediation in the following chapters. Right now let’s take a look at additional benefits to our children that can be gained from turning off the TV and other screens.
If a child is overweight, a pediatrician may recommend shutting off—or at least greatly limiting—TV and video game time. After all, one of the major new factors causing an explosion of obesity among children is the more than fifty hours a week the average American kid spends in front of screens of one kind or another, including TVs, computers, tablets, and smartphones. Instead of burning off all of that wonderful childhood energy, our kids spend more time consuming media than they would at a full-time job.
The reason to stress what’s new is because corn syrup, refined sugars, Snickers, Twinkies, McDonald’s, and Coca-Cola are all at least fifty years old. What is the new factor making our kids fat? In our current epidemic of juvenile obesity, you will find that article after article fails to mention the elephant in the living room. Multiple experimental studies that specifically tested the causal relationship between media entertainment and body fat have provided strong evidence that reducing television viewing is a promising strategy.2 One longitudinal study compared adolescents’ time spent playing video games and watching television or videos and changes in their body mass index (BMI) over a four-year period. The researchers discovered a correlation between large amounts of time parked in front of a screen and a high, unhealthy BMI, leading them to conclude that “lowering screen time, especially among overweight and obese adolescents, could contribute to reducing the prevalence of adolescent obesity.”3 Any time you hear a news report about the causes of obesity and the news anchors don’t mention our sedentary lifestyles, you have to ask yourself why they don’t talk about screen time. The answer, once again, is money. TV shows are never going to tell you to watch less TV.
Media intoxication is also interwoven with sleep deprivation, and sleep deprivation is a key factor in obesity.4 For both kids and adults, sleep deprivation has been proven to make us fat in four ways:
1. You have all that extra time to eat.
2. You eat “stupid stuff.” Sleep deprivation causes deterioration in judgment, rational thinking, and self-control.
3. Commercials are designed to entice you and (especially) your children to eat the foods they advertise.
4. Doctors say that when you are sleep-deprived, your body stops sending the hormone that says, “I’m full,” and instead starts sending a powerful “I need food!” hormone. Have you had a late-night case of the munchies? That’s your body sending the “I need food!” signal to the brain.
If your children have a weight problem, breaking the cycle of media addiction and sleep deprivation is a critical first step. Turn off the screen and make them get the sleep that they need to live healthy lives.
What role do electronic media like video games play in a child’s school success? Several research studies have focused on this topic in response to the rise of entertainment options available to children and the concerns of parents and the education industry that flickering screens may have a negative impact on developing brains. One group of researchers at Denison University recruited the parents of boys between the ages of six and nine who had recently considered buying a video game system for their sons. Half of the families received a video game system immediately, while the other families were promised the system four months later. The children were given reading and writing tests, and their parents and teachers filled out questionnaires related to their behavior at home and at school. After four months, the assessments were repeated. In the researchers’ analysis, the boys who received a video game system spent more time playing video games and less time doing schoolwork. This might not be entirely surprising, but what is important for parents to know is that the boys with video game consoles had significantly lower reading and writing scores four months later than the boys who had no consoles. The boys with video game systems also had greater teacher-reported learning problems.
In a mere four months the boys in this experiment started having learning problems in school, falling significantly behind their counterparts in reading and writing. The researchers wrote, “Altogether, our findings suggest that video game ownership may impair academic achievement for some boys in a manner that has real-world significance.”5
These educational setbacks could not happen at a worse time. The first three years of school, when children range in age from five to nine, are critically important in learning to read and write. Research has shown that students who are not reading at grade level by the end of third grade will have much more difficulty learning advanced reading skills. Falling behind at this early stage can have a negative effect on future educational success and on the ability to get a good job later in life. Students who struggle with reading will be far more likely to drop out of school, be unemployed, and become incarcerated, among other negative effects. Most parents have no idea that the video game systems they buy their sons for Christmas may be the beginning of an academic slump that could affect the rest of their lives.
How exactly do these detrimental effects take hold after video game use? Research has found that attention is one of the major factors that affect a student’s success in school, and attention is seriously compromised by engagement with electronic media. A study conducted by three Iowa State University psychologists looked at elementary school students as well as college students. The researchers followed 1,323 elementary school students for thirteen months. Using parent and student surveys to measure TV and video game exposure, along with teacher reports to measure attention, the researchers found that young students with higher levels of media use had higher rates of attention problems. They found similar results in 210 college students.6 Previous studies have pointed toward correlations between TV viewing and attention problems. This study showed that playing video games had similar effects. After the study, one of the lead researchers wrote:
Brain science demonstrates that the brain becomes what the brain does. If we train the brain to require constant stimulation and constant flickering lights, changes in sound and camera angle, or immediate feedback, such as video games can provide, then when the child lands in the classroom where the teacher doesn’t have a million-dollar-per-episode budget, it may be hard to get children to sustain their attention.
Another study, published in the journal Psychology of Popular Media Culture, followed 3,034 students over a three-year period and focused specifically on playing video games and the impact on attention. The authors concluded:
Consistent with previous research, those who spend more time playing video games subsequently have more attention problems, even when earlier attention problems, sex, age, race, and socioeconomic status are statistically controlled. Violent content may have a unique effect on attention problems and impulsiveness, but total time spent with video games appears to be a more consistent predictor.7
Furthermore, consider the findings of yet another study that examined the impact of violent television on the cognitive skills of young adult males. The researchers used both psychological tests and MRI scans to evaluate their subjects. The lead researcher reported:
We found that the more violent TV viewing a participant reported, the worse they performed on tasks of attention and cognitive control. When we looked at the brain scans of young men with higher violent television exposure, there was less volume of white matter connecting the frontal and parietal lobes, which can be a sign of less maturity in brain development.8
All in all, the research is clear: Electronic media can have a detrimental effect on children’s education, particularly during the prime years during which they acquire basic proficiency in reading and writing. What’s more, the impact of electronic media, and violent video games in particular, can echo across a child’s lifetime, affecting his or her ability to learn new skills.
Media infatuation also results in missing out on some of the best parts of childhood. In Last Child in the Woods, Richard Louv outlines the reasoning behind the argument that human beings need to be outside. We need parks, wilderness, sunlight, fresh air, nature, and outdoor experiences for our fundamental well-being. And this is especially true for children! Louv coins the term “nature-deficit disorder” to explain the harm done to our kids because of the “good stuff” that they are not getting by cooping themselves up all day in front of various modes of technology.9
His book begins with a story about his son:
One evening when my boys were younger, Matthew, then ten, looked at me from across a restaurant table and said quite seriously, “Dad, how come it was more fun when you were a kid?”
I asked what he meant.
“Well, you’re always talking about your woods and tree houses, and how you used to ride that horse down near the swamp.”
At first, I thought he was irritated with me. I had, in fact, been telling him what it was like to use string and pieces of liver to catch crawdads in a creek, something I’d be hard-pressed to find a child doing these days. Like many parents, I do tend to romanticize my own childhood—and, I fear, too readily discount my children’s experiences of play and adventure. But my son was serious; he felt he had missed out on something important.
He was right. Americans around my age, baby boomers or older, enjoyed a kind of free, natural play that seems, in the era of kid pagers, instant messaging, and Nintendo, like a quaint artifact.
Louv is not the only one concerned about the decrease in time children are spending outside. Significant research in a number of fields, including environmental neuroscience, has demonstrated the benefits of being in nature. The exciting aspect of this research is the finding that spending time in nature can counteract some of the problems caused by media overload. One study involving college students at the University of Michigan demonstrates the importance of exposure to nature in young adulthood and beyond. The authors wrote, “Taken together, these experiments demonstrate the restorative value of nature as a vehicle to improve cognitive functioning.… In sum, we have shown that simple and brief interactions with nature can produce marked increases in cognitive control.”10
Research has shown that interacting with nature may be helpful to individuals suffering from depression, a condition that is particularly common in both children and adults who are frequent or addicted video game players. A study published in the Journal of Affective Disorders noted, “We found that individuals diagnosed with major depressive disorder (MDD) exhibited cognitive and affective improvements after walking in a nature setting.”11 Because depression correlates with high media use and violent media exposure, this finding is particularly meaningful in examining the impact of violent video games on the well-being of all individuals in our community.
We know that parks are essential to the health of a city. So what does it mean when you have empty parks and empty playgrounds? You have a sick city. Every time you go past a park or a playground on a nice day and see only one or two kids there, you can be fairly certain that something is wrong. There are thousands of kids sitting in their homes watching TV or playing video games who ought to be out in that park.
The research is clear. The price we pay for media addiction is obese, sleep-deprived children who are hindered in their education and emotional development. If we want communities that ensure all children are mentally, physically, and emotionally healthy, we must provide healthy environments. The next two chapters will offer a road map on how to do just that.