Video Games-Obesity And Anger

I think we have all heard someone say or we were the ones saying it, that playing to much video games will make you fat and video games are teaching our children violence. How in fact can you blame a video game for making your child fat and angry though?

I want to start off talking about the obesity related to video games. As I was growing up I do remember some of the more nostalgic games that are now relics such as Pac Man and Pong on the Atari gaming system, we could never blame those games for making us fat because, lets face it, they were boring has hell and we would lose interest with them after about a half hour of playing them and it was outside we went right! Nowadays the games are far more entertaining and realistic and this gains our attention for hours on end if not for an entire weekend in some cases.

But can we really blame the video games for making us obese? I don't think that we can put the blame on the game honestly, we need to look at ourselves for that blame as nobody is holding a gun to us and demanding that we play, in fact we are actually paying to buy the system, the game and even subscriptions to continue gaming.

An estimated 12.5 million children between the ages of 2 and 19 are obese, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

Over 45% of Americas 12-17 year olds spent more than two hours per day glued to a screen

And did you know that as Americans we are stereotyped as this? The numbers for overweight children is extremely high from what I keep seeing in articles along with the amount of time that we spend playing video games, I don't think that the child obesity rate is so high for any other reason than our parenting skills have turned to crap! Instead of watching our children or playing with them, we let the video games do it for us! I am also guilty of this at times so I'm not excluding myself. To counter the obesity issues, some game manufacturers have come up with great games that I have even purchased for myself and my child such as the WII Fit where you are encouraged to be more physically active along with playing a video game, my daughter loves those dance off games and she gets a brutal workout with some of them while I end up on the floor.

Bottom line is that we can't completely blame video games for making our children fat, as parents we have to take the blame since we are the ones letting them play Battlefield and eat chips and drink high sugar soda. We need to give them fruits to snack on and have them play a physically active game if that is what we want to do or better yet, take your kid to the park and let them play there for an hour.

Speaking of Battlefield, this transitions perfectly into video games and anger issues. Would you seriously put a military grade weapon in the hands of your child and tell them to go kill everything they see? Lol, I highly doubt it, but that is really what we are doing with the video games and we all know that this can lead to anger and violence......right? No!

97% of 12-17 year olds in the US played video games in 2008, thus fueling an $11.7 billion domestic video game industry. In 2008, 10 of the top 20 best-selling video games in the US contained violence.

Still, can you put the blame on the video games or is that again in the hands of the parents? I can tell you from personal experience that it is completely on us as the parents. I used to love playing Battlefield games and I noticed one day that there were more and more kids playing it, those kids would use the worst language that you could imagine and guess who the learned it from? Yup, parents, they would also get super pissed off when something happened to them that they didn't like, again you know who they got that from!

I never really thought much of it except for maybe the parents were idiots or something and they didn't supervise their kids well. Guess what, I decided to let my daughter play that game since she had been asking me for a while and she started acting just like me, getting angry and yelling, yup my poor parenting in that area was shining like a star! Since then I don't play violent video games too often and my daughter is not allowed to at all, keep in mind that this is a kid that is normally happy and very positive that had turned angry. I don't think that it is the game to blame, but myself to blame as she saw how dad acted so that is how she thought she was to act also. Now I like to play more strategic games and she sticks mainly to games like the Smurfs that has no violence. I still let her play Star Wars here and there and I will catch her from time to time getting an attitude when things don't go as planned, again another learned response.