Is your child glued to that videogame controller again? Take a deep breath. Researchers at Michigan State University want you to know that there's a link between video game use and creativity in children.
Specifically, a study of nearly 491 12-year-olds, funded by the National Science Foundation, found that "the more kids played video games, the more creative they were in tasks such as drawing pictures and writing stories."
So are the games the cause of said creativity? The data do not tell us that. What they show is a correlation. It could be that hours spent on Worlds of Warcraft or Call of Duty stimulates neurons in such a way that the imaginative juices start flowing. But just as likely (perhaps more so) is that creative kids are attracted to these games in the first place.
What I read here, though, is the reality-check of a message that parents need not panic just because our children inhabit worlds that are alien to us. We talked about this before on Parentlode, in a post titled "Kids Spend More Time With Screens Than Books."
In that post I wrote:
...know that you are not the first generation of parents to wonder what new fangled things are doing to their children. When the ball point pen replaced the inkwell, there were some who lamented the end of penmanship and discipline. The telephone would clang through family dinnertime! The calculator would ruin their math skills!
In the history of humankind, however, there is no technology invented that has not been used. (Let's leave the defense industry out of this.) So the goal can't be to condemn screens, but rather to learn how best to use them. After all, there can be books on those screens. There is a measurable gain in eye and hand coordination. And there is legitimate value in a screen's ability to quiet and entertain a child in places -- airplanes, long car rides -- where the alternative used to be fidgeting to screaming.
Steven Johnson, author of Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter, has been arguing for several years now, that video games boost brain power. He has not written as directly about a link between video games and creativity, but in his well-circulated talk at TED last year he talked about where creative ideas come from, and concluded that they were born out of chaos, when the brain was busy doing something else entirely.
"A new idea is a new collection of neurons firing in sequence like never before," he says. The queston is "how do you get your brain into places where these neurons are going to fire?"
He cites the first wave of coffeehouses in 17th century England as the idea breeding ground for creativity. Perhaps online gaming is the modern equivalent.
Does this make you feel any better about your child's time spent with video games? Or have you just had the creative thought of your own that perhaps these children would be even MORE creative if not for the time spent with a controller and headset?
Lloyd I. Sederer, MD: Casinos for Kids
http://www.sensorysmartparent.com
There are good video games and lousy ones. I think if you educate your kids, they will gravitate naturally to the games that challenge them mentally in the same way they will choose books or newspapers for quality content.
That said, I do think that video games, like TV, serve to replace time spent doing tasks that develop other important skills. I am struck by how unaccustomed to physical work most children (including my own) are today, and I often wonder what the long term fallout of that is. The children of my parents generation were expected to do a fair amount of manual labor. I think their fine motor and executive function skills, not to mention plain old work ethic, were better than ours. Creativity is great, but I think kids also need to learn how to make a plan and physically carry it out, even when its not fun or the rewards don't come at perfectly calculated intervals (video-game-style).
Video games, unchecked, can eat up a kids whole day. There is too much else to learn. I also think that kids need to expend energy, and when they fail to, they get grumpy. If I unplug my kids at 1/2hr-1 hr, its OK, but if we go beyond that point, the transition gets ugly.
all in all, computers are great for kids to be involved with. gaming doesn't hurt either. but both in moderation. avoid the idea that "gaming is good for kids". it's the same "low fat oreo" nonsense.
As a mom, I still prefer my kids spend the least amount of time on the iPad, Nintendo DS, and other gadgets. But the reality is that we can't escape technology and instead learn to embrace it. As long as we set some parameters to their use, set rules on their playing time, and continue to expose them to books, the outdoors, etc. To each his own, and parents will definitely have different perspectives when it comes to this topic. Thank you for this article.
Uh, weren't they right? Have you seen the beautiful, artful handwriting of the past. Cursive isn't even taught anymore.... no worries about the telephone ringing through dinner because families don't eat together anymore since they are too "facebooked"... don't get me started on Math! The trend today is to not even teach long division because student can do it much faster using a calculator. Students reach college today and need calculators to do simple multiplication. No wonder we are 35th in the world in Math.
Search on YouTube- "Math, An Inconvenient Truth" and you'll see what I'm talking about.
One game my son loves is minecraft, which I describe as an infinite world, where players mine and build things, kind of like lego, but online. One week he and his friends (all in separate homes) were digging a trench and building a railroad, which was tedious and hard, and took tons of cooperative problem solving.
The next week, they had created a monetary system in order to trade resources. My son spent days figuring out how to "back up the money system in order to keep inflation at bay". He was excited when he thought of a way to do it, and then tried it out.
I know someone who works in a former soviet country, and she says the biggest problem, is the lack of critical thinking: the russian schools based on rote memorization produced a bunch of people who are not very creative problem solvers.
As Americans, this is our advantage, and our secret weapon on pulling ourselves out of problems. Will be interesting to see how it all unfolds!