Pediatrics Group Cautions Against Violent VideoGames for ChildrenWritten by Rose Rimler | Published on July 18, 2016

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) is reiterating its long-standing appeal for parents to keep childrenaway from violent movies and video games.

“Although there is broad scienti�c consensus that virtual violence increases aggressive thoughts, feelings, andbehaviors, there has been little public action to help mitigate children’s exposure to it,” an AAP report,published today in the journal Pediatrics, states.

The authors point to decades of research that they say shows a link between exposure to violent video gamesand increased aggressive tendencies.

They also express frustration at the skepticism many maintain about the signi�cance of that link.

“Some contend, rightly, that these correlations are in the small to moderate range, but they are stronger thanthe associations between passive smoking and lung cancer, and many municipalities have banned smokingbecause of that risk,” the authors write.

Read more: Do violent video games create aggression in children? »

A new violent media world

In their report, the researchers outline speci�c recommendations for pediatricians, policymakers, the media,and parents.

“The challenge for parents is to come up with what we could call a healthy media diet, which in my opinion isas important as having a healthy food diet,” Dr. Dimitri Christakis, a pediatrician and the report’s lead author,told Healthline.

That means keeping an eye on quality as well as quantity of screen time, although the academy has recentlyloosened its recommendations on how much time young children should spend in front of a screen.

The recommendations on virtual violence are similar to those the academy put out in 2009. But anaccompanying commentary covers new territory.

That includes how to navigate kids’ exposure to videos of real violence that are shared on social media andeasily accessible via smartphone, like police shootings or acts of terrorism.

“This era is a turning point in what we used to consider virtual violence and we have to think about it nowtotally di�erently,” Dr. Rhea Boyd, pediatrician, and the commentary’s co-author, told Healthline.

With violent, real-world images popping up on social media feeds, anyone can become a witness to realviolence, anywhere and anytime.

While clips like ISIS killings or police shootings are disturbing to almost anyone, adults are better equipped todeal with their feelings and express their thoughts out loud, Boyd said.

She added that a child’s reaction to this new kind of virtual violence would vary depending on who the child isand what community they are part of. For example, an African-American teenager watching the footage ofPhilando Castile’s death might react di�erently than a white teenager watching the same video.

“While the image of the child who consumed virtual violence before was this kind of nondescript child sitting infront of a television playing video games, I think the new image has to be a brown child watching these imageson a cell phone,” Boyd said.

Read more: Children with autism more likely to develop video game addiction »

Action agenda

A child might be spurred to social action, Boyd added, or might be traumatized.

She recommends that teens and their parents talk about how to process these images with each other andwith their pediatricians.

That advice is in keeping with the academy’s recommendation for dealing with virtual violence in general.Pediatricians and their patients should talk about media habits.

The academy also recommends legislative action, including a government run rating system for games andmovies. Right now, industries make up their own ratings, which Christakis says are inconsistent and subject to“ratings creep.”

The Entertainment Software Association (ESA), the industry’s trade group, maintains that the self-regulatedratings are su�cient. The ratings are determined by the Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB), createdin 1994 by the ESA to assign ratings to games.

According to a statement on the ESA website, “Family advocates, elected o�cials, and government agencieshave described ESRB as the gold standard for rating systems, and parents consistently report being satis�edwith the level of information the ESRB rating system provides to help them select games for their children.”

Besides an independent rating system, the AAP also recommends that policymakers “should enact laws thatprohibit easy access to violent media for minors.”

California policymakers tried to do just that, passing legislation in 2005 that would restrict the sale of violentgames to minors. The law was challenged before it took e�ect, and was struck down in the Supreme Court onFirst Amendment grounds.

“This country has no tradition of specially restricting children’s access to depictions of violence,” JusticeAntonin Scalia wrote in the 2010 decision. The United States does have a tradition — legally enforced — oflimiting children’s access to depictions of sex.

Scalia went on to compare violence in games with violence in other art forms, like the classic book “Lord of theFlies,” which is often required reading in schools.

Read more: Playing ‘The Sims’ and other games help train the brain »

First amendment argument

The court’s ruling was praised by many First Amendment advocates.

“If the depiction of violence triggers the power to censor, government can then use that violence as a proxy tocensor the underlying message. ‘Lord of the Flies’ is a particularly good example in that the graphic violenceserves a broader allegory about, among other things, human political and social organization (things that agovernment may very well want to censor),” Gabe Rottman, then a legal counsel for the American CivilLiberties Union (ACLU), wrote in a 2012 blog post.

Critics have described the AAP guidelines against screen time as technophobic and have compared theacademy’s pursuit of violent video games with the social and governmental hysteria surrounding comic booksin the 1950s.

In his interview with Healthline and in the report’s text, Christakis does associate new technology with newdanger.

“As intense as ‘Grand Theft Auto’ is now, imagine playing it with Oculus Rift glasses and being in the sceneitself,” he said.

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