Aggressiveness in children can happen due to many reasons. Sometimes its their home life, other times it can be other kids at school or their environment. Then there is the big dilemma of media playing an enormous role in causing a child to be more aggressive, and not just any form of media, specifically violent video games. Violent video games have been around for years, and the question still remains as to whether they could negatively affect a child’s behavior, more importantly can these types of video games cause aggressiveness?
I feel as though research has always been tricky with this because some studies seem to support the idea that violent video games could cause aggressiveness in children, while others have evidence that refutes this. According to an article I found, it states that researchers have found that there are some kids that may be more likely to exhibit certain aggressive behavior, but with the reminder that it is difficult to draw a direct cause and effect between video games and behavior (Children’s Health, 2020). It definitely could be difficult to know if there are other underlying factors causing the aggressiveness instead of the video games. How could anyone be 100% sure of this, without accounting for any other outside factors that could cause a child to be aggressive? Research is so conflicted that it has become a problem really determining this issue with violent video games. According to research, a 2007 study found that while some children became more aggressive, others became less aggressive. On the contrary, a 2010 study found that video games only lead to aggression in children who display certain personalities (Morin, 2020). Without looking at hundreds of thousands of pieces of research regarding violent video games and childhood aggression, just these couple of studies exemplify that research has mixed views.
With this conflicted research, poses the other issue that the research may not be acquiring for exact behaviors of aggression. A lot of the research on violent video games and children measures frequency of aggressive thoughts or language, instead of measuring physical aggression such as hitting or pushing (Moyer, 2018). I truly do believe this is a huge issue with this type of research because kids display aggression in many different ways. Again, this becomes an issue because even though there are specific testing measures after the experiments are completed, it does not account for previous aggression in the child prior to the experiment. What if they have a behavior issue that involves aggression or are just naturally aggressive from environmental factors? This could mean the research is flawed. But is it really flawed? That remains the question because of other risk factors. The APA has said before that there is no single risk factor that consistently leads a person to act aggressively or violently, but it is an accumulation of multiple risk factors that cause the aggressive or violent behavior with violent video game playing as one of the risk factors (Albanese, 2015). This again goes without saying that aggression can be caused by a multitude of things, and some people believe video games contribute to this, while others do not.
Alright so what do we know? We know that violent video games absolutely can cause aggression in children, but they also may not. Truthfully, it depends on the type of child. Every child is different. Some are impressionable, while others are not. One factor that may influence behavior in children is that they could model themselves after people or characters in the video games that they identify or connect to (Children’s Health, 2020). This could be one of the reasons that they display the aggressive behavior if the person in the video game does. It does not mean that they will remain aggressive indefinitely. TO get into the video game they may just want to act as if the character is acting. We know that there is mixed research that sometimes supports and other times refutes that idea that violent video games cause aggression in children. The undetermined is the level of aggression it causes if it does cause any for certain children in these studies. I think it is still too undetermined to know if violent video games truly do cause aggression in children, and with research improving over the years, one day we may have all of the answers.
References
Albanese, G. (2015, August 14). Violent Video Games Create Aggression, but Do They Cause Kids to Commit Crimes? Retrieved from https://www.healthline.com/health-news/violent-video-games-create-aggression-but-they-do-cause-kids-to-commit-081415#1
Health, C. (n.d.). Do video games cause aggressive behavior? Retrieved from https://www.childrens.com/health-wellness/do-video-games-cause-aggressive-behavior
Morin, A. (2020, March 8). Are Your Child’s Video Games Too Violent? Retrieved from https://www.verywellfamily.com/aggressive-behavior-and-video-games-1094980
Moyer, M. W. (2018, October 2). Do Violent Video Games Trigger Aggression? Retrieved from https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-violent-video-games-trigger-aggression/