Grand Theft Childhood

Grand Theft Childhood: The Surprising Truth About Violent Video Games and What Parents Can Do

Author	Lawrence Kutner (psychologist) Cheryl K. Olson (public health researcher)
Publisher	Simon & Schuster
Publication date	2008-04-15
ISBN	[[Special:BookSources/ISBN+0743299515%3Cbr+%2F%3EISBN+978-0743299510 |ISBN 0743299515 ISBN 978-0743299510]]

Grand Theft Childhood: The Surprising Truth About Violent Video Games and What Parents Can Do is a book by psychologists Lawrence Kutner (psychologist) and Cheryl K. Olson (public health researcher). The book is based on a study the couple ran for the Harvard Medical School Center for Mental Health and Media at the behest of the United States Department of Justice about video games and youth violence. In it they draw various conclusions that run contrary to the rhetoric of various "anti-gaming" politicians and activists. The book's title is a play on the Grand Theft Auto series, a video game series that has attracted a great deal of controversy.

Conclusions

In an interview on X-Play, the authors stated that they found two extremes for boys, and one extreme for girls. They found that some boys or girls who exclusively played M rated games, for more than 15 hours per week, were more likely to get into fights at school, and have a more aggressive nature, although this appeared to be tied to general behavioral problems, rather than caused by video games. They point out that even the majority of kids who played 15 or more hours of M-rated games didn't have significant behavioral problems. Kids who didn't play video games at all (violent or non-violent) actually had the greatest behavioral problems. For the majority of young males playing video games was associated with social competence and not playing them is seen as aberrant. Many young males claimed that playing violent games helped them relax and vent aggression, running contrary to common thinking about catharsis in the social science community.

Lawrence Kutner and Cheryl K. Olson say that although some studies have claimed to show a link between video games and violent or aggressive behavior, most research in this area has been flawed. Some studies dating back to the '80s looked at now-vintage arcade games that don't remotely resemble modern video games. Some studies followed the behavior of only a few dozen kids. Many of the studies don't define what constitutes violent or aggressive behavior, and many confuse short-term and long-term behavior. Many also use poorly validated measures of aggression, that likely do not correlate well with real-life aggressive acts of interest to most parents and politicians.

"You'll sometimes see kids coming out of an action movie making kung fu moves against one another", said Kutner, as an example of the type of thinking behind some of the studies they looked at. "But that doesn't mean they're going to do that against the sweet little old lady down the street," he said.

External links

• Grand Theft Childhood