Do video games and chat rooms have negative effects on children?

By Chas Pridgen

As phones and the internet move to the forefront of a child’s developmental period, meeting strangers in gaming chat rooms is becoming more common. However, there are very few ways to filter who these children are talking to.

Most major online games have some sort of either text or voice-based chat to interact with your fellow players. These chats can be used to coordinate against an opposing team or just to have a good time and meet new people.

Danielle Bocchino, a counselor for an elementary school, sees first-hand exactly how online interactions can have an effect on children’s behavior.

“They talk about how the communication in these chat rooms more often than not turns to people being mean,” Bocchino said. “It’s almost as if there’s a whole under culture about how people behave in these chat rooms.”

Bocchino went on to say there were children who told her about how people over the age of 18 would call them names or bully them for not playing well. Even though the children are upset by these interactions, they don’t leave the chat rooms, Bocchino said, because they don’t want to be labelled a “rage-quitter.”

Dr. Vicki Clements, a pediatrician who is an avid video game player, said that she knows video games and chat rooms have a negative influence on children.

Clements gave an example of a time that a child came in with behavioral problems at school. She asked what kind of video games the child played, and the title was a particularly violent one. She advised the parents to not allow the game to be played anymore, and within two weeks the child was no longer behaving poorly in school.

Clements said she believes that children should be closely monitored when it comes to what games and media they’re consuming.

“When the online recording for ‘Call of Duty’ first got big, we were listening to a podcast and there was this 13-year-old boy telling his mom she better bring him a drink and cussing her out,” Clements said. “I was just appalled. I don’t think kids should have free reign to do anything. It’s not good for them.”

On the other hand, Clements gave some examples of ways that chat rooms can be very beneficial to children. She said that the psychiatrist she works with plays an online poker game with his clients where they are able to speak freely about what’s troubling them. She also noted that the social interactions in chat rooms are sometimes more manageable for people with social anxiety or certain forms of autism.