With the increase of players in the gaming industry, it is no surprise that nowadays there are lots of parents and caregivers wondering how playing video games for hours will affect their children. In fact, you might be one of them reading this post right now, asking yourself: “should I be concerned about my child spending so much time in front of the console?”
Well we will be clear regarding this question, keep in mind that nothing, absolutely nothing in this world in too much excess is good for a human being. So if your little man or girl is spending half of their day playing video games, you should be concerned and try to prevent it. Because as any child, they need to socialize properly and spend time with other kids too, so they can develop properly into adulthood.
But not everything is bad news. In fact, we are writing about this because we find that it is very important to remark the positive facts of playing video games, and educate our audience that letting your kids play the console for a few hours a week can be even good for them.
1. Playing video games as a child can protect you from dementia.
Recently, new studies exploring the link between video games and cognition revealed that, playing games as a child can improve a person’s working memory years later on specific tasks. Some of them showed that it could improve learning and may even protect against dementia in older adults.
2. Video games help improve cognitive and emotional skills.
On the other side, another review published by the University of Milano Bicocca, arrived at the conclusion that video games could have some important benefits on cognitive and emotional skills.
3. Playing the console can provide a better working memory.
To finish, a study that was featured in Frontiers of Human Neuroscience journal by UOC researchers of Universitat Oberta de Catalunya found that those who played video games at a younger age showed greater improvements in their working memory than those who did not. That fact leads to the conclusion that playing video games can actually have long-lasting benefits for cognition.
So pretty much you have your answer already, letting your children play video games can have beneficial effects, and can only harm them when you let it become an uncontrolled addiction. Just as coffee, chocolate or anything else in this world.