Your 8-year old is bouncing off the walls, moving from one conversation to the next without a break in between. He can’t stop fidgeting and stops listening to you after you’ve uttered your second sentence.
By Mary E. Shacklett
Published: January, 2007
Is this normal kid behavior, or do you call the doctor?
Twenty years ago, if we saw children who were impulsive, inattentive, and hyperactive, we would have treated this behavior with discipline rather than medication. That is, until the early 1990s.
What changed?
Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) and its treatment were on the scene as early as the 1960s, when the American medical profession decided to use the drug commonly referred to as Ritalin to decrease the symptoms associated with minimal brain dysfunction (now described as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder). What changed in the 1990s was the frequency with which the disorder was diagnosed and treatment was prescribed.
ADD is now the official diagnosis of 3-5 percent of our nation’s children. During the 1990s alone, there was a 700 percent increase in the use of psycho-stimulant medication. Youth doctor visits for attention deficit disorder increased by 90 percent from 1989 to 1996, and stimulant treatment for preschool-aged children increased three-fold from 1991 to 1995. In the forty-year period from 1960 to 2000, there was more than a 100-fold increase in the annual rate of drug treatment among U.S. children.
What’s Causing ADD?
There is no single identifiable cause for ADD, but certainly the rapid pace and the enhanced animation technologies that pack heart-in-your-throat excitement into every minute of contemporary films, television and video games are under the microscope.
The first computer game, a version of Tic-Tac-Toe, was developed in 1952. Tennis for Two, the first video game, followed a decade later. In 1971, the trilogy was completed with the first arcade game, called Computer Space. By the end of the 1970s, video games had become a preferred childhood leisure activity, with approximately 29 percent of male and 15 percent of female youth playing video games at home for three to six hours per week, and with fantasy violence as the most widely favored category of game playing. These statistics do not make it a leap of logic to consider that video games could greatly affect children’s behavior.
Studies have been conducted that indeed demonstrate negative behavior patterns in children that computer and video games have been shown to contribute to. These studies have indicated that chronic play of video games actually lowers the metabolic rate in the frontal lobes of the brain, which diminishes attention, impulse control and other executive functions. Additionally, research conducted by the National Institute of Mental Health concluded that extensive exposure to television and video games may promote development of brain systems that scan and shift attention at the expense of those that focus attention. Further, the techniques used in electronic media to create high-impact audio and visual information in short blasts may be secretly undermining some natural attentional mechanisms in the human mind.
While some studies indicate adverse effects from playing computer games, they would probably do the same for virtually any activity that is pursued to excess. The truth is, there is also a beneficial side to computer games. Computer games can assist with hand-eye coordination and attention to detail. Video games have been used to increase children’s ability to sit still and concentrate for long periods of time and have led to increased abilities in several visual-spatial and critical thinking skills. Overall, computer and video games may also help address the academic and behavioral performance issues that many children with AD/HD experience.
Computer games can be a very positive and education-enhancing experience, or they can be negative. To better ensure that game playing is beneficial:
1) Limit playing time;2) Keep your computer in a central
room to discourage isolation;
3) Engage in pro-social video games;
4) If children are playing,
monitor games closely for developmental appropriateness.
Mary E. Shacklett is President of Transworld Data, a marketing and technology practice specializing in marketing, public relations and product management for technology companies and organizations. Mary is listed in Who’s Who Worldwide and Who’s Who in the Computer Industry. She may be reached at (360) 956-9536 or TWD_Transworld@msn.com.
