Study "Strongly" Links Gaming With Kids' Poor Attention Spans

[DamienHell]

I don't understand why people act like ADD is a bad thing. I consider it important to only concentrate on important things. I was diagnosed with ADD when I was fairly young and it's been VASTLY more beneficial than detrimental. I'm top of my class, love what I do, and I'm rarely bored. Its a simple matter of finding what interests you and making a career and a life out of it. People who concentrate on everything lack focus, and are probably more stressed in life.

 

[likalaruku]

Gamers are more likely to have attention problems.....or People with attention problems are drawn to gaming? I had ADD looooong before I got my first console. Hell, I had ADHD before my mom gave me a TV to calm me down & keep me quiet & still.

Parents like to use studies as biased scapegoats; anything that makes people with ADD happy is apparently bad for them.

 

[Dastardly]

The problem here is EXEMPLIFIED by video games, but the problem isn't games themselves.

The problem is that kids don't HAVE TO pay attention to things like this for any major stretch of time. As soon as something gets bored, there are BILLIONS of other things they can go do instantly (thanks to our internet-based culture, especially). As a result, kids aren't developing the "mental muscles" they need to pay attention to something past the novelty threshold... or even worse, to something inherently boring.

And things like paying bills and meeting deadlines are both very boring. Learning and following the guidelines on your workplace's Material Safety Data Sheets is boring, and they can't put a cartoon on each page to keep you interested. The most important thing we have to learn in life is how to do the things we NEED to do even when we don't WANT to do them. And that's not magical knowledge that sprouts in our heads at the age of 18, so if kids aren't learning it, ADULTS aren't going to have it later.

Entertainment is also becoming far more passive. Shows and movies spell everything out very clearly, so there's little call for the viewer to really be engaged. Music is safe and repetitive, offering little variety or "challenge" to the listener. Video games are, in many cases, become essentially long cinematics during which the player occasionally pushes a button or steers a character... to the next cinematic, allowing them to re-live the movie they just watched in theaters.

The cure here isn't just to limit the amount of time a child spends playing games. Parents have to stop taking the "easy" route, letting kids stop everything halfway as soon as it gets difficult or boring. Just because there are tons of options available doesn't mean you should let your kid get ankle-deep into all of them, but never really demonstrate any sort of commitment.

The study is doing a decent job of identifying a symptom of the problem... but it fails to address the core issue (which one could say CAN'T be addressed)--you can't legislate or regulate parenting.

 

[Trogdor1138]

Well fucking duh, games are cool. Maybe kids just don't like being bored, did they ever think about that? They need to be entertained and to develop their mind.

 

[Dastardly]

Actually, from what I've heard in personal experience, is that teachers would love to make their classes more interesting. There are a couple of main issues with this. The first is that some teachers may be fairly old and have been trained in older methods which do not lend themselves easily to modern adaptation. Secondly, here's the big one, they have to make sure they meet the standards and rules of whatever Educational organisation is managing the school curriculum[footnote]In Australia, it's the Curriculum Council.[/footnote]. It's not like their lessons are randomly made up on the spot, each lesson and the entire subject's work, is planned.

As a teacher, I'll say this is largely true. We try to make things as interesting as we have time for. Several problems, however, are inherently going to hamper our attempts:

1) What is "interesting" to you, me, and someone else may vary WILDLY. There's not enough time in the day to do it each person's "way."

2) Some topics aren't exciting at all, at least to some people. That doesn't mean it's not necessary for them to learn it. It just means they can't rely on novelty or games to make the task easier.

3) Kids have to learn how to do things they don't like. They have to learn to function in environments where THEIR enjoyment, or indeed their comfort, are not the priority.

4) We have a mistaken belief that imagination and creativity are the opposite of a controlled learning environment that places limitations on the student. If you really watch people, you'll find that freedom STOPS creative thinking far more than it promotes it--give a child complete freedom, and they'll do largely the same thing every time. And yet every single invention mankind has ever seen was a reaction to a LIMITATION placed upon the inventor--the limitation is what led to the creative breakthrough.

 

[asinann]

How much you wanna bet the parents of most of those children have never told those little snots "no."

 

[Danpascooch]

Well no shit, of course having a source of constantly evolving visual and audio stimulation at your fingertips is going to make you impatient!

 

[Drexlor]

Kids paying more attention to fun and exciting things than tedious and bland things? This is absurd! Now lets focus on slandering video games instead of actually making school more relatable and interesting.

 

[Divine Miss Bee]

i'd personally go with the idea that kids with attention problems turn to games and TV shows as a way to entertain themselves without a ton of focus required-they have the cause and effect turned around. games may not help, but they're a symptom, not a cause.

also, ADHD is a fancy diagnosis for natural childlike curiosity mixed with bad parenting (my child is being childish! kill it with fire!), and anyone who tells you differently is trying to sell you a prescription for personality-killing drugs.

 

[Stuntcrab]

parents can now worry that videogames are draining their kids' attention spans just as much as the boob tube is.

So they worry about games but not about the complete fatness, lasiness of america? wow

 

[KaZZaP]

Just because some one can only really pay attention to video games doesn't mean anything bad. Just means that kid should get a job in game design. Being passionate about something isn't bad, and if nothing else interests the kid then you should get him all the games he wants. If building models or painting or something is all they could pay attention too no one would care.

 

[JohnSmith]

Actually after a brief peruse of the actual journal article I have come to two conclusions; firstly the researchers don't know there arse from a hole in the ground and secondly the study data was taken from a another study on childhood obesity where they had the children cut down on the amount of screen media they watched and increase intake of fruit, vegetables and exercise so in short there are a dizzying number of possibly confounding factors at work.

Also this was a longitudinal study which if I am reading their tables right only took data ove a 13 month period so at best they are really saying that it maybe co-morbid but I digress while the article was quite strongly worded even in its conclusion it throws around words like "most of the research", "theoretical reasons", this study does not have any stronger link between screen media and ADHD than the link between the green house effect and the number of pirates. In fact a more in depth review of the article reveals that the level of attention disorder in the child group was assessed by there teachers on a five point scale, so thats not very reliable data there.

The point I am driving towards is that the journal article was in technical terms "a bit shonky" but the way it was reported particularly here can only be seen as a deliberate beat up to incite the kind of impotent rage that forum views are made of. Also for the record 67% correlation is not strong, it really, really isn't.

 

[Guilen-]

Is there anybody else in this world that thinks these video-gaming patterns are leading towards an ACCELERATED -*multi-task-oriented*- attention span that is easily bored by standard operating procedure? I mean, seriously. Every time people stop acting normal we consider it a deficiency, and don't even offer the minute possibility that we're evolving in some fashion. This is a surefire way to repress the future, isn't it? What if we are raising a world of kids who can think like an Operating System?! Surely this isn't so bad Maybe, just maybe this will lead us to a group of people who can handle the complexities of overpopulation and immense diversification and help us survive the environmental and cultural clusterfuck our ancestors built up for us? NAH! We're assembly line rejects! Pffffffft Please, let's not have science be a mask for insecurity. (Carefully and responsibly) Believe in your children.

 

[Miumaru]

Maybe if school was made to not be so god damn boring. My US history teacher could do it, the rest of the school can damn well do it too.
Maybe it just means people prefer not being bored.

 

[SextusMaximus]

Another ridiculous test... probably from the people who proved that "Gamers aren't athletes".

Would a kid rather play Video Games than do homework? Yes. The point of video game making is to bring the player into the game. Almost resulting in a break out from the outside world.

 

[Skyy High]

Wow. Ok, I guess I shouldn't really be surprised at how spectacularly poorly this article would be received here, but are you all just that bad at reading comprehension? Or is it simply, and more likely, that over half of you didn't bother to actually read the study in question, or even the OP's summary of it?

First off, to the few people still chanting "correlation does not prove causation": yes, we know, they know, they explicitly said that, thanks for identifying yourself as a perfect example of a gamer with attention problems. Moving on...

Slightly less obvious, but still baffling, is how so many people are reducing the conclusion of the study to "kids are bored by boring stuff and interested by games, DURHURR!" That is not what the study says. No, it's not. Read it again: it says compared to non-gamers, kids who play for over 2 hours a day have an increased tendency to have attention problems. The comparison is the key point, the entire reason for the study to exist. Of course kids aren't going to be as interested in school as they are in playing games; games are designed to be fun, that is their purpose, whereas teachers struggle (sometimes successfully) with making school fun, or at least tolerable.

Lastly, 67% is a huge correlation factor for a sociological study. Trends with correlations of 30% are still taken seriously, that's just a matter of fact when dealing with random human populations. I know this to be true because my mother is a social worker, and I used to laugh whenever I'd read a correlation factor in some journal article she'd read, because (as a chemist) I'm used to seeing R-squared values of 0.95 and greater.

I believe that, as a community, we've all become so accustomed to rejecting any claims that gaming may have any negative effects on children (or society in general) that we'll brush off any seemingly legitimate concerns as propaganda meant to destroy our hobby. Really, what was the take-home message from this study? That children shouldn't play more than 2 hours of games a day. Is that really so apocalyptic that we can't even consider that there might be some legitimacy to this study?

We've all turned into fanbois for gaming, blindly defending the hobby at the drop of a hat without even realizing what we're defending it from.

 

[Anticitizen_Two]

I love gaming and have a very good attention span. Then again, my mom stopped me from playing many games during the early part of childhood.

 

[Belbe]

2hrs? Who can live with that? I've played more than 2hrs everyday since I was like 2 and no one would consider there being anything wrong with me...