below is a bbc artilce detailing a recent call to have a national debate on the importance of play in children's lives. it relates also to earlier posts on "junk sleep" and nutrition deficits. it would be interesting to see some research on the role of consumer electronics on kids well-being in ireland. we have the results from Frey and others claiming that TV usage at the high-end reduces well-being and can be thought of as reflecting self-control problems. This should be more pronounced for children i would have thought.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6986544.stm
2 comments:
As ever,it would be very difficult to get at causal relationships between well-being & play because of unobserved heterogeneity and confounding variables.The sort of things that affect play, use of TV (weather,parents etc) are also going to be correlated with well-being.
Play enhances pretty much all the useful skills for later life, motivation, social-emotional growth, even cognitive growth. A decline in interactive play will mean a decline in social skills. This will have numerous detrimental implications down the line. Examples are misconstrual of action as aggressive leading to assault, poor team interaction skills, and poor empathy leading to lack of charitable inclinations or community spirit and an increase in sexual assault.
I would like to see the effect of the types of computer games children use on childrens approach and effectiveness in regard to everyday problems. On the one hand, computer use opens up a large area for the development of intellectual skills through stimulation and problem solving and learning to interact with novel environments. On the other side, computer games which involve repetitive rather than novel strategies may lead to an adverse approach to problem solving and constructive interaction in the real-world. I'm not aware of any studies examining this but a good place to start would be use of rapid-fire computer games and a tendency towards surface rather than deep processing style.
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