Categories: Geek

“Grand Theft Childhood” Authors: Kids Who DON’T Play Videogames are at Risk

Grand Theft Childhood is a new book written by Dr. Lawrence Kutner and Dr. Cheryl Olson, a husband-and-wife team who co-founded the Harvard Medical School Center for Mental Health and Media. In the video above, Drs. Kutner and Olson talk with X-Play’s Adam Sessler about some of the findings from the study documented in their book.

Some notes:

Their study lasted several years and received $1.5 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Justice.
In their study, they surveyed and interviewed over 1250 kids and 500 parents.
There is “absolutely no evidence” that playing violent video games turns children violent.
What’s more important are patterns of play — there are some that parents and teachers should note.
In their research, Drs. Kutner and Olson tried to find out which videogame playing behaviours are normal, and which aren’t, a cataloguing of behaviours that did not previously exist in the literature on this topic.
They debunked the experimental methodologies used by researchers who’ve made the vidogames-violence connection.
One of the flaws in those older experiements was that it didn’t take short-term vs. long-term behavioural effects into account. He cited an example of boys’ horseplay after seeing an action film: it wears off pretty quickly.
They found that both boys and girls who played M-rated or violent videogames exclusively more than 15 hours a week to be statistically more like to get into trouble, but they also found that boys who didn’t play videogames at all were also at greater risk.
At least for boys, gaming is a marker of social competence.
Consider the case of the Virginia Tech shooter: although the pundits were quick to place the blame on videogames, he didn’t play them at all, and his dorm-mates said he wouldn’t play videogames with them.
Kutner: “Kids who don’t play [videogames] at all are actually at greater risk for getting into trouble. It says something about their social relationships.”