Teaching Kids to Think (20 page)

What Type of Video Games Can They Play?

When deciding the limitations around the appropriate uses of video games for your children, it is important to consider the type of video games they are playing. A whole range of games now promotes fitness and keeping kids moving—for example,
Wii Sports
and
Just Dance Kids 2
on the Xbox Kinect. Those interactive games are better than the sedentary types where you bury your body in a beanbag chair to play. In fact, it's pretty satisfying to watch kids actually work up a sweat playing video games.

When choosing what type of video games you allow your child to play, you should always consider the rating, issued by the ESRB. Their ratings guide can be found on
www.esrb.org/ratings/ratings_guide.jsp
. We could write an entire book about video game ratings, but the fact is, it is a parental decision and each family needs to consider their own boundaries. Children simply want to play whatever their friends are playing without any consideration of the content or appropriateness. There are some red flags to watch out for that will help guide your decisions.

First, video game ratings are there for a reason. Even if your child tells you that an “M” (Mature) rated game is really OK, you need to trust the rating. Also, just because they tell you that “all their friends are playing them” doesn't mean that it is appropriate for your kids, and “all” may turn out to be just two friends. One example of this could be the military or war-simulation games like the
Call of Duty
franchise, which feature realistic weapons, unlimited violence, blood, and gore, and unchecked profanity.

Every child is an individual. It is important to watch for an increase in acting-out behavior that you can closely associate with the content of a video game. Some children simply can't control the adrenaline released when they are playing the more aggressive games. For many kids, it is not that they will imitate things they see, but parents will notice that after playing games with aggressive content, their kids will be more impulsive, aggressive, or verbally inappropriate in person.

Social Networking

Websites and social media applications like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Snapchat, Pinterest, and whatever comes next make it easy to interact with people via the Internet. You may think this only applies to teenagers, but a recent study found 90 percent of third graders are already online, which means even very young children are at risk here too.
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People have their own ideas about how to use these social sites and what rules apply. If you survey your friends and family about how they utilize social networking, you will get as many answers as people you ask. The use of social media ranges from keeping up with friends and family to career networking, and all the way to celebrity stalking. In their simplest form, social networking sites are a lot of fun and a great way to keep in touch with people, and even communicate information like party invitations or special announcements. But social media also makes it very easy for children and teens to feed their need for instant gratification, while potentially putting themselves at risk for identify theft and worse.

Who Is a “Friend” on Social Networking Sites?

Many teens and young adults use social networking sites to monitor the activities of their friends (and compare them to their own), communicate their daily feelings, showcase their activities to other people, and gain new friends. In many ways, it becomes a measure of their social and emotional status, on par with GPA being used to measure smarts, as discussed in
chapter 6
. However, this is a very misleading communication tool.

Posts on social networking sites are detached from reality. Updates or photos often don't realistically show how a person is doing, just how the person wants others to think she is doing. In that way, a person's profile and activity on a social network is like a reality TV show—she may be a real person, but what she is doing and saying is a performance for the audience. If she sees a peer's post about going to a party, she feels she is not as well liked if she didn't get invited to the party. We continuously hear things like, “Everyone was invited to the party but me,” when, in fact, only three of the person's peers got together. It just
seems
like “everyone” when it is broadcast on the social network that she is plugged into. Getting information in this way makes it easy for the Instant Gratification Generation to quickly jump to unfounded conclusions without having much evidence or an opportunity to talk and ask questions about the situation. Very similar to text messages, there is a strong chance for misinterpretation when answers are expected immediately, and the recipient acts, responds, or formulates an emotion without waiting for all the information.

Another misleading piece of information on social media sites is the number of friends or followers a person has on his page. When a teen talks with us about a friend she met on a social networking site, very often the other person is not a friend at all, but someone who was a friend of a friend of a friend, who knew someone the teen actually knows. Yet she is having conversations with these people.

Child:
Hey, that kid is one of my Facebook friends.

Parent:
Do you want to go say hi?

Child:
No, we are not really friends and I don't know him; we are just Facebook friends.

So the concept of a friend has been blurred into an acquaintance or just a name we see on a computer screen.

Gaining a large number of friends and followers has become very important with this generation, particularly because it serves as a status symbol. They want to appear to have a lot of friends online, which those connected to the network associate with being socially popular in person. Another reason is that the more people with whom they are connected, the more things they have to look at to immediately fill their unstructured time. Because of the broad reach to large groups of friends, it is easy to get feedback from a lot of people quickly when you make a post. If a person posts a picture or updates his status on Facebook, he constantly checks to see who might have commented or “liked” it. If he doesn't get the feedback he wants, it impacts his sense of social acceptance. For example, a teen girl shared, “I posted twice and Jan never commented, so I think she is mad at me.” She never thought to call Jan and ask her directly, or talk to Jan in person. Instead, the teen was drawing conclusions in real life based on the detached and misleading information provided on the electronic social networking site. She responded impulsively to what she thought should have happened and made instant assumptions when a friend didn't immediately respond. This pattern of allowing an online social network to govern off-line life is becoming very prevalent. This habitual connection to the electronic world really eases children into becoming more comfortable being out of touch.

There Is No Privacy in Social Networking

Social networking fits nicely in the comfort zone of most children; it is electronic, stimulating, immediate, and easy. They also like that you don't actually have to talk to people, be groomed or dressed, or even get off the couch to do it. The concern is that things can happen quickly, and impulsive responses and posts happen all the time. Once something is posted, it is there forever, potentially. Even if you go back on the site and remove it, there is no way to control who saw it and what they did with it (e.g., take a screenshot). When celebrities make a post or comment that is extremely insensitive, it is quickly taken down when their agent sees it. However, it is always too late. Once it's posted, it's out there and out of their control. The same thing happens all the time with children and teens. They use social networking sites to express their impulsive emotional reactions to something they experienced. Look at this post from a fourteen-year-old client:

“To all you who pretend to be my friend: if you can't be a real friend, and you know who you are, you should delete me as a friend because if you don't, I'm going to do it to you anyway!”

That night this girl got texts from two of her friends asking her if she was OK and telling her they were true friends. However, she also went to school the next day and said people avoided her and some gave nasty looks. She posted this after something occurred with two people, but her four hundred online friends and the friends of theirs all read it. This is but one example; we could add many more just like it. A lot of children and teens today simply cannot delay their impulses long enough to think about the appropriateness of their post before putting it out there for everyone to see. They simply do not realize how far reaching their posts can be.

Not only do peers they don't know see their posts, but there are many other people out there collecting information about everyone. Advertisers are looking at your posts to determine what they should be trying to sell you. Employers are looking at your posts to see if you are trustworthy and professional. The social network itself is collecting all your pictures just in case they might want to use them, and they don't need your permission or approval to do so.
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Most disconcerting, however, is that there are criminals and voyeurs online looking to see if you have made yourself vulnerable in any way that they might be able to exploit. It is important to teach your children to think about what they post, and where, before they do it.

Television