Jub wrote:Or a child swallows a piece and chokes to death, or gets poisoned from something in a science kit, or has some other mishap. That's he actual worst case scenario. In any case, the point is, that parents need to pay attention to their kids and any parent doing that won't be buying that an 18+ rated game.
Swallowing pieces is more of an issue with parents watching the children directly, not keeping track of their toys- it's not like there's any shortage of other things that a child can choke on. Getting poisoned from a chemistry set is an issue... and it's already had a huge effect on what kind of chemistry sets are even available. Nobody in their right mind lets a child, even a twelve or fourteen year old, play with concentrated sulfuric acid.
That is a different category of consequence than having your child playing a game full of casual felonies where prostitution is a gameplay mechanic and blowing up police is a major form of entertainment. There are, under a lot of theories of childrearing, good reasons why you want to control the child's knowledge of these topics until they reach an age of rationality, partial maturity, and something resembling a moral compass.
I don't care about theories show me hard proof that video games have ever made anybody that wasn't already predisposed to violence into a danger to others? If violent video games really did make one more violent, should we be bracing for a crime wave right now? GTA came out 13 years ago on the PS2 and restrictions on the sale of video games were more lax at that time. Plus if a kid played that game at as young as age 5, he'd be a legal adult by now, so please show me all the social ills that have cropped up due to these violent games?
[/quote]1) It's damn near impossible to show causation in psychology and you know it. Single anecdotal cases are useless*. Large statistical correlations are more significant, but how on Earth are we to do a longitudinal study that reliably singles out one cultural stimulus out of many? You're asking for a type of evidence that basically cannot exist.
*(For every "this kid was locked in a closet every time he talked back to his mother and turned into a serial killer" case there's a "both my parents beat me with metal bars and I turned out fine except for the broken bones.")
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More to the point, the argument "the children will be more violent if they play violent video games" is NOT WHAT I SAID. You're strawmanning me.
The argument is as follows: for children to grow up functional, they need to develop a meaningful sense of right and wrong.* Children are born largely amoral- unable to fully understand the needs, interests, or rights of others, bad at foreseeing the consequences of their actions. Teaching responsibility and the moral sense is a very high priority for anyone who wants to get childrearing right.
Unfortunately, there is no scientifically defined "here is how to raise children with a moral sense" in the sense that one can have instructions for "here is how to forge steel." Parents do their best, but it's more art than science. And one of the major concerns is that children are very good at misunderstanding and misapplying 'lessons' they 'learn' from observing certain behaviors. Children are great at learning by example, but not so great at interpreting what they are seeing correctly and without bias.
This leads to kids thinking stuff like "Bobby steals people's stuff all the time, and it's hilarious, so stealing things is harmless fun!" Or "You didn't do what I want you to do, so why should I do what you say I
have to do?"
And as yet, nobody knows how to raise children to bypass this- how to give them the judgment and common sense adults use to understand when a rule should be followed and when it shoudn't.
So from the point of view of the parent, it is reasonable to want to control the child's access to depictions of violence or crime until that child is, in the parent's judgment, old enough to understand that what they are seeing represents unlawful, improper conduct.
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*This is one of many things. They also need to develop a variety of important behavior patterns. Like being able to take turns, to share, to divide up a complex task responsibly among a group of peers, to control the urge to escalate a situation out of vindictiveness, and resist the impulse to make a scene in public... and we've all seen what happens to people deficient in these areas for whatever reason. They become a burden on all around them and are often labeled "childish."
