I think the author is dangerously naive because young children, much more so than adults, have a hard time distinguishing between the real world and one's imagination. For them, the border is much more fluid and harder to see.
And it's not like we're talking about a 14 year old playing D&D here with heroes and castles and dragons, oh my, but rather a 4 year old with cops, hookers, pimps, drugs, car chases, mugging and vandalism.
How do you know you aren't just a child with an overactive imagination who think's he's an adult? Since you say a child couldn't reliably tell the difference...
It's really dehumanizing to take a very large group of people and basically say they are incapable of decent thought like you and need to be controlled.
There has been myriad research detailing the adverse effects of children (aka developing humans) viewing violence, sex, drugs, etc. I think four year-olds safely qualify as developing. If stuff like this isn't alarming enough, consider a more extreme example like the two year old in Indonesia who smokes a couple packs of cigarettes per day http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/asiapcf/05/31/indonesia.smokin... . You're hurting these kids' chances (of living a healthy life/of relating to their peers/of being successful/ etc)
For those hounding me for citations, here's something I quickly rustled up:
I don't think it's fair to compare playing a video game in which one does bad things with actually smoking in real life.
As to the studies, I've read some such studies and deemed them invalid or unscientific. Can you cite one that you would stand behind as rigorous and accurate?
[Edit: Can you site ONE study that you will STAND BEHIND? One you've read in full. Not three studies you just googled. I can google studies too...]
You are on very shaky ground with this line of argument, which attempts to cast aspersions at basically all of psychology because of controversies unrelated to the the issue we're actually talking about.
Yes, there are questions about whether playing "Mature"-themed games actually causes problems for teenagers.
Yes, there is an effort, probably ill-conceived, to restrict access to "Mature"-themed games for teenagers.
We are not talking about teenagers; we're talking about a 4 year old.
One simple axis of argument to observe here is the Harvard (Kutner & Olson) vs. Iowa (Anderson) debate; Kutner's book points out that much of the psych research is methodologically flawed. But both Kutner and Anderson agree that exposure to very violent games is associated with increased aggression. Kutner just doesn't want to see all games demonized for all pre-adult age groups.
What if increased aggression is good for you? I seem to remember another study about men with long middle fingers (indicating high testosterone levels) having a significantly higher income.
Naturally the rest of society wants us to be docile, but it is not necessarily what is good for you. Also, the people with the guns usually win and set down the law. "We can talk about everything" is a lie.
You've used the weasel words "associated with" which are common in psych studies.
One thing "associated with" does NOT mean is "caused by". It's consistent with, say, people first becoming aggressive and then taking up violent games afterwards. And it's consistent with taking their violent games away from them making them more, not less, aggressive.
Anyway, just because two people from a debate agree doesn't make something true. And just because psychological studies are flawed for irrelevant reasons doesn't mean they aren't also flawed for relevant reasons. Feel free to cite a study you'd like to stand behind...
Something's gone pear shaped in this discussion if I have to weasel my way through it. Sorry. I'd just like to point out again that it's not like we're arguing about anthropogenical global warming here. Developmental psychology, along with (I hope) common sense, suggests very strongly that 4 years olds are not 14 year olds.
I've cited researchers (both with litanies of studies) downthread.
Developmental psychology, along with (I hope) common sense, suggests very strongly that 4 years olds are not 14 year olds.
Which cleverly dodges the question at hand. Cartoon violence and/or sex: harmful to kids or not?
The big problem with most of the psych studies indicating "harm," for some definition of harm, is in the controls. Typically they'll sit some kids down in front of an Xbox for a measured period of time, and monitor them for signs of aggression and aberrations in empathy. The control group consists of another group of kids sitting in the next room playing with crossword puzzles.
The control groups in these studies should consist of kids running around outdoors playing Cowboys and Indians, but that never, ever seems to occur to the psych majors. It's almost as if they initiated their studies to demonstrate a preordained conclusion, or something.
> You've used the weasel words "associated with" which are common in psych studies.
That's what psych studies do - they establish correlations. People are not crash-test dummies that can be produced identically in quantities and experimented on. Different people respond to experiences differently, but that doesn't mean you can't say that those experiences are generally harmful or generally beneficial.
Nobody claims that psychology has the predictive power of physics, but that doesn't mean it has nothing useful to say.
> That's what psych studies do - they establish correlations.
And that's why they are useless. Because correlation isn't causation. Or in other words, because "aggressiveness is correlated to GTA" is fully compatible with GTA reducing aggressiveness. Whenever correlation studies try to give conclusions, they are reliably compatible with the opposite of their conclusions, so they are just nonsense...
Speaking of smoking, I wonder what's the author's opinion regarding alcohol. I and other friends have drunk (or better said tasted) wine and beer since we were kids (less than 10 years old) and we haven't become alcoholics. Sure, I know a couple of people who drink a bit too much at parties, but still, I don't think that forbidding them to drink until they were 21 would have avoided this. If someone wants to shoot himself in the foot, I don't see how some law can stop this.
I think this is true. There is even ample evidence that relaxed approaches to alcohol does not have an adverse affect. In France, for example, it is (or was) pretty common to offer children small amounts of wine or beer at a relatively young age.
My family had a similar approach and I turned out ok :)
Start here, with a semi-skeptical take, and follow the names to the researchers websites and to SCHOLAR.GOOGLE.COM. There's controversy, but this isn't fringe science.
What do you mean by fringe science? The authors in that wikipedia article claim most studies have been flawed, and even their own can't show causation.
I also still remember being a kid, which gives me a somewhat biased opinion, I guess.
My own non-scientific guess would be that peer pressure is more important. Personally I was never much into watching gruesome movies, for example, but for a while it seemed to be a test of courage among other kids my age. So essentially kids might have been watching more gruesome stuff than they really liked because of peer pressure. Or they really liked that stuff - then I wonder why?
Also as kids we loved Wild West stories, would dress up as Cowboys and Native Americans and shoot around with toy guns. The totem pole and the associated torturing were a particular favorite. We never mistook play for reality, though (no real torturing).
Yeah, me too, but that didn't happen when you were FOUR, right?
Let me disclaim right here that the kind of bad parenting on display in this article is of approximately the same valence as the bad parenting I inflict on my kids on a weekly basis. I'm just saying it made me queasy is all. The kid, who is clearly awesome, is going to be fine.
A two year old is not capable of understanding that an object doesn't cease to exist when they can no longer see it. This is why peek-a-boo is enthralling to babies.
There are similar developmental challenges faced by the human brain over it's lifetime. It never stops changing. At some point, we draw a line and say that it is grown up, but it's a blurry line.
There is nothing de-humanizing about taking a group of people (based on age) and saying they are incapable of certain types of thought. Adding the word "decent" as you did would be adding subjectivity and moral judgement, however the parent post didn't say that.
You might not remember it, but you also struggled with certain concepts: object permanence, abstract thinking, reasoning. Assuming a child is the same thing mentally as an adult is a huge mistake. We may grant them the same basic human rights, but they are absolutely not capable of the same level of thought. That's why we have a different word for them: children.
At the age of 3 or 4 children are just starting to understand the concept of "same" and "different".
Here's some information about childhood milestones:
I agree and being the father of a five year old I experience every day how little idea I have about how he understands things. As an example he is currently struggling with the idea of things being relative, so while I watch the world cup and say that one of the teams playing are a good soccer team, he will respond that then the other team must not be good. For some reason he really needs this to be true for his world to make sense.
There are just so many learned realities that we as adults assume but which kids have no idea about, to the extent that we have no freaking clue about how they see the world.
Sometimes I think about what the difference between an 18 year old and a 24 year old's brain is. Or, perhaps the difference between a 30 year old and a 50 year old person.
I think we have an intuitive understanding of it and it shows up in a lot of public policy debate. People talk about ageism and old people "not getting it" and older folks have a similar "kids these days" feeling. I wonder what part of that is simply due to differing world views caused by differing brain capabilities. Nobody seems to talk about that when we debate these things. I'm sure its being studied.
Avoid exposing preschoolers to violent media and video games. It's correlated with increased aggression and poorer judgement. It's also --- and here I'll have a harder time citing sources --- cruel. I felt bad for the little boy when he felt bad about "running someone over". There was no reason to expose him to this kind of emotional confusion.
It is not "dehumanizing" to suggest that a 4 year old doesn't have the same cognitive function as a 14 year old.
Even if I accept that it's correlated, that doesn't mean the exposure is bad in any way. Games can be correlated to aggressiveness but also reduce aggressiveness. Correlation isn't causation.
Just having been a child at one time, and now an adult, and seen and interacted with children, should give plenty of experiential evidence consistent with my original comment's claim. This is really not rocket science or esoteric: it's actually pretty much part of everyday common sense for a lot of adults, especially for anybody that is a parent or who has taken care of children professionally. No academic paper citing is needed.
The psychological capabilities of young children are remarkably consistent and well established in the literature. It's not unreasonable to make generalizations about them.
regarding your 2nd paragraph: let's say I were to make the claim that most babies can't walk or talk well, take care of defecatory body functions well, etc. Would you think that was dehumanizing to them? Are you saying babies should not be controlled? Let babies roam wild in the streets, in the forests, on the highways? Have you ever came into contact with babies, let alone children? :)
I for one think we must control babies. The risk that they might rise up and overthrow us is just too great to ignore. :P
Most of the time a parent and his child agree about who should control something. The parent pays for the baby's food and the baby doesn't object. This is not "control" in the relevant sense because the baby prefers it be this way. And other times the baby decides on the location of his rattle. He exercises some control over his life and his parent is fine with that.
The interesting case -- and the one where the notion of an adult controlling a child is most relevant and meaningful -- is when there is a disagreement. Then if the adult, say, unplugs the TV to prevent the child playing GTA, against the child's will, he is taking control of the situation and exercising control over the child's life.
A wide variety of excuses are given for adults controlling children as a react to disagreements. One particularly generic and offensive one is "kids don't think so good". This sometimes takes more specific forms, e.g. "kids don't think so good on the specific issue of differentiating between virtual reality and reality" (btw, ironically, most adults are extremely bad at that same issue in some different forms, e.g. they don't really understand that when they "see" a chair the visual image is a VR rendering inside their head).
Anyway, here is a fact that, ahem, adults often mess up and which many young children intuitively seem to grasp: if we accept that the ratio of stuff adults are right about to stuff children are right about is 1000:1, it does not follow that in a disagreement the adult is right (or probably right). This is because disagreements do not happen in a random sample of cases. Disagreements only happen when both parties judge that they have relevant information that the other hasn't properly taken into account.
In disagreements, it's nothing but sheer unadulterated arrogance (and irrationality) to assume one is right. And to attribute this assumption to demographic characteristics of the other person is dehumanizing.
I think a lot of what your saying is thoughtful and worth considering, but relevant mostly to kids at around age 10. Prior to 7, FMRI suggests that kids don't even have a real concept of empathy yet (which btw has profound impact on how you handle discipline, in directions I think you might find congenial).
But again we're talking about a 4 year old. It just shouldn't be controversial (or, worse, acrimonious) to suggest that the rules are different for preschoolers.
FMRI studies suggest that children prior to the age of 7 don't have a fully developed (or useful) concept of empathy.
Therefore, when your 4 year old eats your 5 year old's cookie, it isn't productive to demand that the 4 year be held to account for "how it would make YOU feel if HE ate YOUR cookie". It's confusing and irrelevant to the child.
Since parents for most of the last century have used exactly those words on little kids, I have illustrated a disagreement between me and a hypothetical parent, and resolved it with a very, very basic finding of developmental psychology.
That disagreement is not very relevant to whatever it is our disagreement is, but it does illustrate that the logic you're deploying isn't... um... controlling? here.
Incidentally, isn't it a little bit weird that I'm taking this side of a discussion against the author of the "Don't Fight" iPhone application? =)
The science states that they don't understand empathy until age 7. I would hazard an alternative explanation: it takes years of training to become empathetic.
I don't think morality is about empathy. I think the "how would you feel if..." arguments are bad. So I wouldn't consider this a significant problem, if true.
I don't know if you've read through my app, but I think you will find it's consistent with my views in general, and thoroughly fails to advocate empathy.
I would be more inclined to point out that if there is a disagreement about a cookie, it is in everyone's interests to use a truth seeking process to find out the right thing to do. Then everyone can win. With fighting, someone loses, and it will sometimes be you, and even if you win the other guy uses his creativity against you instead of cooperatively.
I think most of morality can be learned or deduced by applying empathy. Morality and empathy are closely related.
Like the Golden Rule, for example. Do I like being slapped? If no, don't slap. Do I like to be stolen from? If no, don't steal from others. And so on. Empathy towards others goes a long way towards being moral -- even if one has to "fake" it at times.
Truth is a good thing, agreed. But I'd say that philosophy is an ineffective way at arriving at truth, however. Science, logic and mathematics are much better at it.
Philosophy also suffers from some crippling flaws that Wittgenstein pointed out.
lol, witt was a terrible philosopher (if one can even call him a philosopher -- he did not have philosophical problems). if you try reading Popper instead you'll find philosophy is rather better.
epistemology is a very important and useful field. at least i think so, feel free to post or cite a criticism. i'll accept that most of the rest of philosophy is a bad signal to noise ratio.
What exactly is the danger, though - that the 4 year old will try to steal a police car the next day?
I think there are lots of different studies. One I heard about years ago was that kids tend to have an individual level of violence in stories/movies that they want to tolerate. So it is questionable if the kid would seek out the violent situations.
After all, he was not playing alone. Sure, in GTA you could probably walk into a brothel and meet prostitutes. But so you could in the Real World TM. Perhaps like in the real world, not much bad stuff would happen in GTA if parents are watching.
* Be harmed emotionally by the events, possibly in subtle ways; for instance, the child will have nightmares. Will nightmares permanently damage the kid? No. But neither does stubbing your toe. You don't wish that on a kid either.
* As a result of that, or because of learning the wrong message from the experience, the child will act out in ways that will (a) harm other kids and (b) (more importantly) get the kid into needless trouble.
No, he's not going to go steal a car or run over an old lady. Nobody is saying that. But I'm going to stick up for the original poster who, like me, was apparently made queasy by the idea of exposing a FOUR YEAR OLD to GRAND THEFT AUTO.
Freely admitted: my first reaction to this story was, "aw, that's so cute." The negative stuff crept up on me.
I don't disagree with your overall point, but I think you picked a bad example.
While I wouldn't wish for my kid to stub a toe at any given moment, I also wouldn't want her to grow up without the experience of toe-stubbing - it teaches a valuable lesson (be careful of where you put your feet!).
But isn't that exactly one of the reasons to play games: to be able to explore dangerous things in safety? Maybe somebody should devise a toe stubbing game...
I don't know enough about GTA, but it seems as if he was able to play without severely bad experiences. Granted, running over the lady was questionable, but apparently his dad managed to convince him it was a game.
Also, not sure how much can be done against nightmares. The imagination is there - you can't always predict what scary ideas it might create.
That said, there are probably lots of other things to do besides playing GTA...
On the account of nightmares. My first prolonged exposure to violent video games did result in nightmares. I was round 6 at the time and have spent two hours playing Battle Chess.
However, many other events result in nightmares. And I reckon that gaming is a worthwhile cause.
And it's not like we're talking about a 14 year old playing D&D here with heroes and castles and dragons, oh my, but rather a 4 year old with cops, hookers, pimps, drugs, car chases, mugging and vandalism.