One of the biggest hobbies that children and youth love right now is video games. It makes sense as they are growing up in the age of technology and they get hooked to games they can play online with friends or by themselves. The COVID-19 pandemic has only intensified the love for video games, and mom may be starting to worry.

Mom may be worried that her child is relying a little to heavily on video games for entertainment and that they may actually develop an addiction to consoles and screens. According to Science Daily, mom’s concerns are not completely misplaced.

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The love for video games has gotten so intense among the youth of today that a new diagnosis has been proposed. It is called Internet Gaming Disorder. IGD would involve situations where video games are impacting school, work or friendships and no matter what a person does, they cannot get the person to stop or cut down on their video game times. This would lead to children lying about how much they actually play. This description sounds a little too familiar to descriptions given to other addictions.

This may lead mom to wonder if their child may grow to develop more serious psychiatric conditions if they cannot get them to stop playing video games. A research group at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology recently looked at the connection to see if any existed, and they had some good news.

They looked at the connection between children with symptoms of IGD and mental health problems and they found that there is no connection between IGD and psychiatric problems. What they did find was that children between the ages of 10 – 12 who had symptoms of IGD actually had fewer symptoms of anxiety two years later than their peers. They are not sure why this is, but they suspect it may have something to do with the social aspects of online gaming, or the fact that video games serve as a distraction for other external problems.

When they looked for signs of anxiety, depression, ADHD and oppositional defiant disorder, the children who were displaying symptoms and behaviors did not associate with IGD. This may be reassuring news for mom, but if she feels that her child is playing too many video games, she may want to have a conversation with her child’s physician. Too much of anything is rarely a good thing.

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Source: Science Daily