Video game addiction is a real concern for parents, but there is a lot you can do to prevent this from occurring. Here the following are tips for parents on how to protect children from video game and screen addiction.
Kids need limits and boundaries to know what is normal and healthy for them. Limiting the amount of time that your children spend sitting in front of a television, playing video games and surfing the Internet is important, especially in today's world of technology. Here SurveilStar Parental Control Software can protect kids from video game addiction.
Video game addiction is the overuse of video games whether online or at a console. Although this type of addiction is not yet considered a formal diagnosis, this should still be treated as a disorder. Here the following are interesting statistics about video games according to a recent study of 1,178 children in the US.
These statistics raise some interesting questions. While the majority of kids who play video games don’t become addicted, what does it say about our culture when one third of our boys have felt addicted to video games? How do video games and other stimulating products prepare our kids for the future? What child, after the excitement of 14 hours of video games each week, doesn’t get bored when faced with “spending time with grandma”, or some other activity that doesn’t provide intense stimulation?
Furthermore, Japanese researchers found that playing computer games stunted the development of the frontal lobe of the brain in teenagers, which is a crucial part of developing impulse control. The tendency to lose control is not due to children absorbing the aggression involved in the computer game itself, as previous researchers have suggested, but rather to the damage done by stunting the developing mind.
But how are concerned parents to decide when school plus video games equals overload? Here the following you can refer:
If the answer is "yes" to more than four of these questions, then your child may be playing too much. As a parent, maybe you need to be vigilant about your kids and take some measures to protect your kids from video game addiction.
Phil Anton, age 17, loves video games, but he has never let them get in the way of school or sports. Still, there is growing concern that not everyone knows when to stop. Dr. James Scully, the psychiatric association's medical director, said the group will seriously consider the AMA report in the long process of revising the diagnostic manual. The current manual was published in 1994; the next edition is to be completed in 2012.
Up to 90 percent of American youngsters play video games and as many as 15 percent of them — more than 5 million kids — may be addicted, according to data cited in the AMA council's report.
Joyce Protopapas of Frisco, Texas, said her 17-year-old son, Michael, was a video addict. Over nearly two years, video and Internet games transformed him from an outgoing, academically gifted teen into a reclusive manipulator who flunked two 10th-grade classes and spent several hours day and night playing World of Warcraft.
In a February posting, a 13-year-old identified only as Ian told of playing video games for nearly 12 hours straight, said he felt suicidal and wondered if he was addicted. "I think i need help," the boy said.
Here the following are all the parents can do for protecting your children from video game addiction:
1. Limit your child to 1 to 2 hours of total daily screen time
This recommendation includes TV and video games, with the total time spent playing video games being included in that 1 to 2 hour allotment. If you are having difficulty thinking about how your child will be entertained without more than two hours of screen time, you may need more help with parenting skills.
Besides making rules for your kids, you can also explore alternative activities for and with your child, and include a range of indoor and outdoor, mental and physical, social and lone activities. The more flexible your child is in adapting to different social settings, tasks and environments, the less likely they are to depend on one way of coping (such as video games, the internet or TV).
2. Stay updated with research into the effects of video games
At present, research into the effects of video games is in its infancy. Furthermore, research findings are inconclusive, and the video games industry are promoting their own research which, of course, indicate that video games are healthy and harmless.
Consider the source of any research you read, and visit this guidesite at regular intervals for research and recommendation updates. Signing up for the newsletter is a good way to stay updated with new content on the site.
3. Monitor and restrict your child's use of video games
Consider purchasing monitoring software monitoring software such as SurveilStar that will tell you what sites your children have visited in a given time range. Video games that contain violent images, as well as in other media, may promote aggressive thoughts, feelings or behaviors in your child. Therefore, you should pay particular attention to violent content. Also be sure to set parental controls on the television and the computer to lessen the chances that your children will see any unfriendly content.
Video games are so popular among kids and teens that it seems like a normal activity for you to support as a parent. If your children play video games, you may be screening the content carefully to try to reduce their exposure to objectionable material like sex and violence. But even if your kids are playing the tamest games on the market, they can still suffer great harm from video games. That’s because video games are designed to be addictive – and they steal valuable time and energy away from your kids that could otherwise be used for healthy childhood activities. So for preventing your kids from video game addiction, you need to install a Parental Control Software on your kid's computer to monitor and restrict your kid's playing video game.
SurveilStar Parental Control allows you to record and monitor Internet activities in local area network. It can monitor all popular web browsers and clients, like MS Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Netscape Commnicator, Netscape Browser, AOL Explorer, Avant Browser, Maxthon, NetCaptor, SlimBrowser and much more with time stamp, title, size and URLs. Everything will be recorded without being detected. So it is especially useful for parents, who need to know what and how much time their kids are playing in video game.
With this Parental Control Software, you can monitor your kid's online activity and prevent your child from video game addiction. This Parental Control Software will take screenshots of your system every few seconds, and then lets you view it in a video-like display whenever you want to check up on your kid's computer activities. Besides, it will logs all computer activities including startup/shutdown, logon/logoff, hardware changes, software changes, application usages, website, document, printing, shared file logs, email send/receive, instant messages, application statistics, web statistics, traffic statistics, and more!
