“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.”