“Boys, if you don`t stop fighting down there you are both going to lose the privilege of the Xbox!” Shouts my mom to my brother`s downstairs as they continue to fight over who is winning in their latest Xbox duel. Most young kids spend their free time using their Xbox, Wii, or PlayStation consoles to game with their friends.  Multiple parents find themselves asking, “When is enough enough?” Video games are enjoyable for today`s young people, especially boys, but they can create various problems.

Some say video games and other electronics are taking over young people`s lives.  Typically young people will quickly deny this assumption.  However research on CNN suggests differently.  According to CNN ninety percent of children in the United States, ranging from age eight to sixteen, play video games, of that ninety percent who play video games, on average thirteen hours per week are consumed by gaming.

Since so many kids are playing video games it is fairly obvious many of them have been exposed to a violent video game. Legislators have tried to create taxes on mature rated games and limit the age groups that can buy adult rated games.  Despite this,  in Minnesota kids seventeen or younger can have a parent or guardian buy them.

It is hard to picture a video game that does not have any kind of violence in it, since most games revolve around killing, stealing, or hurting people.  For example, in Grand Theft Auto whenever the gamer kills a character in the game, they are rewarded.  Children, and even teen`s minds are not fully developed, so when they grow up with this type of violence surrounding them, it can be hard to separate real life from the animated games they play.  Young minds are very impressionable, olluting their brain with violence is going to make it very hard for children to understand that violence is not the answer to real life situations.  In fact, some would say if children were never exposed to these violent images and actions on the screen, the images would never be in their head and they would not act by following the scenarios they have previously seen.

Bullying often times is a direct result of violence.  Especially in a school setting, bullying has grown increasingly serious and is not taken lightly.  Some forms of bullying can be directly related to the violence kids are seeing in video games.  The 2008 study Grand Theft Childhood concluded that sixty percent of middle school boys that played at least one mature rated video game had some kind of physical contact with another child, in some cases hitting or beating someone up.  This is compared to only thirty-nine percent of boys who did not play any mature rated games.

Several studies have been taken trying to get to the bottom of the correlation between videogames and violence.  The latest study was published in the journal JAMA Pediatrics.  A group of scientists headed by Craig Anderson, director of the center for the study of violence at Iowa State University, studied 3,034 children ranging from ages eight to seventeen in Singapore.  The researchers conducted this study for three years and various trends were found due to this research.  For example as the children got older they thought it was okay to lash out at their peers and bring violence to real life situations.  The new study also found that long term video game usage can change a child`s behavior by “producing general changes in aggressive cognitions… regardless of sex, age, initial aggressiveness, and parental involvement.”

It is clear to see that video games do have a negative effect on children.  As gaming systems become more and more common in every household there is no guarantee a child will not be exposed to this kind of violence.  However, the most important thing to remember and teach a child is moderation; most things can be used well in moderation.  At certain times it may be necessary to do as my mom does and take the gaming system away;  this will teach children there are consequences for their actions and violence is not always the answer.