Slippery Slope to Online Addiction
Fine line between normal use and going overboard
A few weeks ago, Walnut Creek Intermediate’s auditorium was crammed with parents eager to hear therapist Steven Freemire’s take on Wii, iPhones and cyber-addiction.
He started the talk with a few examples drawn from friends’ and patients’ experiences, including the following scenario: It’s a sunny Sunday afternoon, and a Walnut Creek teen is indoors, gazing unblinking at the flickering screen. For hours, she buffets the game-controller buttons, eager to reach the next level and the next and the next. Finally, six hours later, she tears herself away and goes on with her day.
“Problem?” Freemire asked.
Seventy hands shoot up.
In truth, however, the answer is no. This particular girl has a great circle of friends, gets consistently good grades and plays competitive soccer. And after an intense week, capped off by a Saturday spent on the soccer field, she was simply decompressing on a Sunday - her one day to relax - with a new video game.
“Six hours could be a danger,” Freemire said. “It wasn’t in this case.”
Less than a year after the American Medical Association backed away from labeling video-game addiction a mental illness, the debate rages on, particularly for the families of the 10percent to 14percent of avid gamers who have become so obsessed with video games, Facebook and other computer- based pastimes that their virtual lives are damaging their reality.
“There’s a fine line between addiction and the fact that most of our lives are spent on online,” said Larry Rosen, a California State University, Dominguez Hills, professor who wrote Me, MySpace and I: Parenting the Net Generation.
“Kids? Their whole social life is online. They’re IMing, and if you throw in texting and (school) work, it’s 50 hours a week. Is that addicted or are they just responding to their world?”
The line is crossed, he says, when grades drop, chores go undone, and children disappear from the family dinner table, wooed by the allure of that glowing screen.
It’s not just teens, of course. While we most frequently associate cyber-addiction with video games, adults are notorious for their dependency on BlackBerrys, compulsive e-mail checking and the “just one more thing” approach that keeps them online half the night, Lafayette therapist Dominic D’Ambrosio said.
A 2006 Stanford School of Medicine study found that 14percent of the nation’s Internet users - adults, not kids - found it difficult to stay off-line for several days, and nearly 9percent had lied about their Internet use to spouses, friends and colleagues.
And according to a Harris Interactive poll conducted last year, the average adolescent plays 13 hours of video games each week. Teen boys average 18 hours.
Interestingly, young gamers worry about their own level of addiction. About 44percent of the young gamers in the survey reported their friends were “addicted,” and 23percent of the boys said they worried about themselves, as well.
Determining addiction is about more than just adding up the hours, said Douglas Gentile, an Iowa State psychology professor who directs research at the National Institute on Media and the Family.
Gentile adapted gambling addiction criteria from the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual on mental disorders to paint a vivid pathological portrait of kids - and adults - whose obsession with and need for increasing amounts of game play to reach the same level of thrill, spills into the rest of life, sabotaging relationships, school, work and eventually health.
But if families and video gamers themselves knew what to watch for, experts say, problems could be alleviated before they become destructive.
“A parent has to be really proactive,” Rosen said. “Because by the time it gets to the point you’re noticing, you’re now reacting. You have to get in there and understand what your kid would look like if he were addicted. You have to be up front with the kid: Here are the symptoms; if I see it happening, here’s what we’re going to do.”
The challenge, Rosen said, is that most parents have absolutely no idea what their kids are doing. “They don’t even understand what MySpace is and what function it plays.”
Another mistake is to take a laissez faire approach, relying instead on their children’s ability to self-regulate their own use. Developmentally, kids might not be ready to do that.
Yet, self-regulation is key, Freemire said, because trying to ban the Internet is like banning food. It’s too ingrained in daily life at school, at work and at home, precisely because of its positives.
Text messages become notes of reassurance flowing between kids at college and their siblings back home. Facebook, Skype and Web cams bring faraway friends and family close. And Joseph Ross’ grandparents swing by his Pleasant Hill house each week to play.
“They always want to do the Wii bowling,” said Joseph’s mom, Julie. “My dad’s 83, and we can’t keep him away from the Wii.”
Source: Los Angeles Daily News, CA
http://www.dailynews.com/news/ci_8825402
