Essay: Children Should Not Be Allowed To Play Violent Video Games

Playing different kinds of games has become a common activity for people from all spheres of life. Video gaming has become a million-dollar industry, generating far more income than DVDs and movies. It has emerged as an imperative source of entertainment not only for adults, but also for children. Most of the children spend a fair share of their time in playing different video games. Violent video games are more attractive to youngsters than other video games such as sports, puzzle, and strategy games. However, video games are considered to have positive impacts on children’s growth, children should not be allowed to play violent video games because they do not only have detrimental impacts on kids’ physical and mental health, but also have serious repercussion on social relationships. 

The first reason why children should not be allowed to play violent video games is its adverse physical implications. Kids usually spend most of their time in playing such video games that attract them to participate with keen interest without taking care of their health and they do not take meal on time. In return, their health gets compromised badly and they end up with malnutrition and various other physical illnesses. Moreover, when adolescents playing violent video games their brains and hearts are overstimulated, that results in serious physical damage to their body and vital organs. When violent video games incite children to participate in different situations of tension and pressure, their heart rate and blood pressure automatically increase to the greater extent. This hyper-arousal state of “do or die” while playing violent video games can also cause a heart attack and stroke in the future in children. Various researchers have also accepted the negative implications of violent video games on children physical health and declared that obesity is another noticeable adverse physical consequence of video gaming. Not only this, elongated exposure to the blue light screen during playing video games also disturbs children’s eyesight as well as muscles. Thus, due to adverse physical consequences of violent video games children should not be allowed to play them. 

Second imperative cause of not allowing children to play violent video games is deteriorating mental health of children. The content of video games contributes to the great extent in developing a child’s mind. There is no denying a fact that the violent content of video games can lead to various unfavorable psychological issues in children. It has been observed that violent video games divert the student’s attention from their purposeful academic studies and in turn poor academic performance is ostensible in kids. Moving further, children’s mental status also get disturbed due to the obsessive language and fierce actions that children observe and learn from these violent video games. More amazingly, in the recent decades technology addiction has evolved as a new phenomenon due to which millions of youngsters are prone to a variety of mental illnesses and psychological issues. Children’s addiction to various violent video games causes them to adopt such aggressive behavior that they observe while gaming, which lead them towards a number of emotional repercussions as well. Take the case of a rising number of fights and skirmishes over trivial issues among children that never happened earlier at the time when kids were only known to healthy outdoor recreational games and sports.   Ergo, violent video games disturb the mental growth of children and lead them to a number of psychological issues. 

Lastly, violent video games are not recommended to children to play because they are damaging social relationships. It is implied that kids learn social skill from observing and interacting with their parents and other members of society. If they rarely pay attention to the outside society and their parents, children fail to learn social skills that are imperative for them to become a productive part of a society. Children who spend most of their time in playing violent video games and too little time interacting with others, have increased a cause of poor social relationships. Kids spending more time on playing video games in front of screen, face difficulty in taking sound decision and dealing with demands as well as problems of the actual world. Not only this, it has been witnessed that kids who spent a fair share of their childhood in playing violent video games in front of the screen without having much interaction with parents and other family members, had issues in getting and securing good jobs and maintaining good relations. Therefore, violent video games should not be allowed to children to play as they also result in psychosocial issues.

To conclude, there is no denying a fact that violent video games are detrimental to children in multiple ways. Due to violent video games physical health of children is badly affected. Kids’ mental health is also at stake owing to addiction to violent video games. What’s more, poor social relationship is another grave repercussion of such video games. Therefore, kids should not be permitted to play violent video games as its repercussions in the term of physical and mental health as well as poor social relationships are far reaching.