Video Games: Influencing Children's Behavior and Mental Health

Introduction

For many years video games have been a great influence on children giving them a chance to be entertained for a couple of hours. On the other hand, parents should become aware on what exactly their children are playing. In this generation technology is becoming more popular and video games are producing more and more in order to catch the children’s attention especially the violent ones. Games like “Mortal Kombat” “WWE” “Madden Football” and many more. Children learn from what they see, so if they see violence in a video game they will become more aggressive and have a bad behavior. Video games are bad influencing children to lose focus, become aggressive, if mental illness can be affect more,and create a change in behavior causing

By: Paul Adachi and Teena Willoughby the article talks about how violent video are influencing people in general and causing them to become influenced by the video game creating conflict to society. In this study, the article did not say how many participants there were, but there were two different groups. One group will play violent video games and the second group will play nonviolent video games. The point this study as mentioned before is to see if video games cause aggression to children, adolescence and even adults. For example, thirty-one percent of adolescents play video every day and another twenty-one percent plays games for about five days a week. What is most concerning is the fact that almost half of the population plays violent, plus five out of ten play violent video games (Adachi, Willoughby, 2011). Both the articles that are mention both have a connection to the perspective theory of conflict and symbolic interactionism when being exposed to video games it causes a major conflict with others around them. Another example was the columbine shooting the shooters were teen boys and had been exposed to video games giving them that opportunity to learn on what they are play. By playing video games it cause danger to society and become highly aggressive (Adachi, Willoughby, 2011). Both articles talk about how video games are a negative influence and how it is being affected in

Ferguson and Cheryl K. Olsen discuss whether or not if children with pre-mental illness could be affected if they are exposed to video games more particularly to the violent video games. Within this study about 377 children who had any sort of pre mental illness to see if violent video games will be affected causing them to become delinquency and have any sort of violent behavior. This study was linked back to the columbine shooting back in 1999 where the mass shooters were exposed to video games before the incident getting ideas (Ferguson, Olson, 2014). While the study did not support their hypothesis that violent video games does not cause greater effect on those with pre-mental illness, they did find that aggression does occur after being exposed it. Violent video games are being exposed to children in this generation more than ever. It causes children to believe that what they see is okay to do. Conflict theory is mostly involved with this article due to the fact that video games can expose children to become something that they are not and also causing problems with others around them. Symbolic interactionism also does play a role in this article as well, linking back to the columbine situation the mass shooters created hatred towards their classmates causing them not to interact