A girl is obsessed with social media, a boy with video games. An adolescent girl defines herself with selfies and visual sexualization. A boy sexualizes his brain with porn use. When I delineate “girls” and “boys” in my lectures, some people say, “But shouldn’t you say, ‘kids,’ or just ‘teens’? Girls look at porn, boys take selfies; girls like video games, boys like social media.”
“There’s no doubt about that,” I respond, “but in each of these categories there is male/female brain difference, thus we see larger numbers of girls and boys frequenting each area. Seeing digital life through the lens of ‘digital boy’ and ‘digital girl’ has proven effective in protecting our children.”
Today’s blog post deals with protecting boys’ ‘gaming’ brains. Everything in the blog can apply to girls, as well. This blog is Part I of a multi-part and extended blog series I will share throughout the year as we look at the brain science—and practical strategies–surrounding key areas of male and female digital life.
I’m often asked whether video games affect brain development. They can, and they do, but let’s be clear: video games are not evil. Gaming includes many positives. When parents and children play them together, good bonding can occur; between gamers, too, including interactive gamers, wonderful bonding occurs. Videogames can help brains with certain types of ADD brains to focus better on certain tasks. Every video game—even ones that we might find despicable, like Grand Theft Auto—can become assets in a boy’s moral development, especially if we discuss the games with the boys.
But they are also potentially dangerous—neurotoxic–to brain development in three primary ways.
- Playing videogames can pull boys away from other physical and cognitive development activities, e.g. physical play and schoolwork, as well as service and work activities that are essential to male development.
- Playing videogames can fool the brain’s dopamine/reward system, making boys dependent on hyper-rewarding visual and digital experiences for self-motivation.
- Playing videogames can re-route brain circuitry in such a way that a boy’s social emotional and character development may suffer now and in the future.
“But for which boys,” someone will ask. “All boys or just some boys or maybe just a few boys?”
All boys, depending on frequency of gaming, can be affected.
This blog will help you become a “citizen scientist” so that you can study your son to see if he is one of the affected boys. As you do so, you will be looking developmentally at your son because his age of brain development matters. An hour of videogame in a nine-year-old boy’s life on a school night is more potentially neurotoxic than it will be in a nineteen-year-old.
The First Danger: Distraction from Other Crucial Developmental Experiences
Let’s say you have a ten-year-old son who plays an hour of videogames on a school night. Study and observe all the things he is not doing during that hour.
He is not involved in physical play, which would likely develop more good brain circuitry than a videogame.
He is not involved in doing educational development, such as doing homework or exploring a chemistry set or building something or reading books.
He is not involved in service activities (and later, once old enough, may not become involved in work activities) that more holistically develop his brain.
He is spending that hour doing an activity that is pleasurable but non-essential to the healthy and varied brain circuitry he needs to become a mature adult.
From ten to fifteen especially, the male brain is involved in pruning activity. The brain is destroying cells it is not using and keeping cells it is using. When videogame technologies get involved, the brain will often keep the cells used to play the games and destroy cells used for some physical, cognitive, and other essential development.
Parents can often see this happening in their son without realizing what they are seeing: as he gradually stops doing other activities, like reading or homework, in search of time for videogame play. His brain is moving its developmental trajectory towards one activity and away from various others.
An adult brain will likely be able to self-modulate and self-regulate so that videogame play remains compartmentalized in “pleasure” time, but a child, tween, and even early teen brain may not be able to do this. It will likely need adult help in creating a schedule for videogame play.
No videogame play on a school night is an often used and a healthy rule to follow. Little or no gaming for a younger boy is also potentially important. If video gaming is potentially neuro-toxic for a ten-year-old, it is even more so for a seven-year-old.
You know your own son and you can study your own son; you have the power to decide what is best. For child and tween brains, video games are most likely helpful as luxuries or privileges rather than daily activities, especially if the boy is also spending many mores hours on screens, too: Internet, laptop, I pad, Smartphone, TV, movies.
The Second Danger: Rewiring the Brain’s Dopamine/Reward System
Gaming makes the caudate nucleus and other reward-oriented brain centers flood with dopamine, the reward/pleasure chemical. Because gaming is so hyper-stimulating, the brain loves all the reward it feels. Because the male brain is so visually and spatially excited by the videogame, reward chemistry gets wrapped up in hyper visual-spatial activity.
The issue for male brain development does not solely lie in the fact that videogames create so much visual-spatial reward activity; even more important, this hyper-rewarding neural activity can deceive the boy’s brain into thinking it is accomplishing something. As visual-spatial and pleasure circuitry get intertwined, male testosterone rises with the competition of the game, which floods more reward chemistry through the brain. “I won!” the brain says. “I built something!” “I did something huge!”
In fact, real accomplishment barely occurred, if at all. That accomplishment will more likely come from doing homework or chores (practicing responsibility) or relating in some deeper way to parents and others (developing more emotional intelligence). But these feel like smaller things to a brain that requires, after months or years of heavy gaming, the hyper-stimulation—including hyper visual-spatial stimulation—of gaming.
The male brain is already prone to seeking visual-spatial/testosterone-based reward chemistry, thus it can become obsessed with this kind of circuitry use—rewiring the brain toward what is now called “video game addiction.” Many boys who are called “addicted” are not technically addicted through addiction genetics; rather, they are “addicted” to a rewired biochemical process that over-uses visual-spatial areas of the brain in a gaming/competitive reward format.
As a citizen scientist—a concerned parent—you can develop a healthy developmental plan for a boys’ videogame use, one that fits the use of the games to the maturation points in your son’s development. Saving Our Sons, Chapter 7, provides developmental stages from birth to adulthood that you can use to help build your plan.
As you study your son’s joy at gaming, watch carefully whether he is accomplishing important things during his day or weekend. If he is, then his gaming may not be an issue. If he is not, however, then gaming will likely have to stop for a month or more as you help him re-orient toward other, healthier ways to stimulate reward chemistry: visiting nursing homes to provide service to people in need, getting better grades, building real things, and spending more time in responsible family life.
The Third Danger: Neglecting Emotional Intelligence and Character Development
Not surprisingly, the videogames boys especially like often have components of both violence and sexualization in them. Soldiering and a warrior’s life are key to videogame success. Female warriors are dressed in skimpy clothes and most possess a nearly impossible body type.
If you ask a twelve-year-old boy, “Hey, do you know that swords and guns will not solve everything?” he’ll likely answer, “Duh,” with an almost adult tone of irony. If you ask him whether most women will ever look like the women in the game, he’ll likely frown at you, seeing through your attempt to educate him on what “reality” is.
Yet, what is happening unconsciously is important. If the boy is a pre-pubescent or early adolescent gamer, his brain may not be able to fully differentiate what he is seeing from what he is internally experiencing. A seven or nine-year-old playing a lot of these games will likely absorb the imagery and can set out on a path of desensitization to violence. If any boy sixteen or under is playing violent video games more than a few hours a week, it is very possible that desensitization is occurring through the games.
This can affect the development of emotional intelligence pathways and centers in the brain, and it can negatively affect empathy and character development.
One way to track this is simply to track, for one month, the amount of time your son spends gaming. After you’ve tracked it, talk with everyone in your family, including your son, about what affects you all believe the gaming is having on your son. As you develop a plan for gaming, you can direct your son towards character-building activities outside gaming, activities surrounding family, faith-community, if you are involved in one, extended family connections, and social justice causes.
Within gaming, too, you can add character and moral development, which increase emotional intelligence. Boys are not just playing a war game—they’re entering a world of soldiery in which, General George Patton argued, men search for their souls. From a neural viewpoint, Patton was saying that, males develop neural pathways between the limbic area and the temporal lobe, the part of the brain known to activate during spiritual and moral awareness. It is often in this part of the brain that the ineffable becomes meaningful to boys—soul becomes a source of power, purpose, and independence.
Boys can’t generally talk about all this, and, truthfully, who can without creating argument or confusion? But we all know it is there—indescribable; a transcendent feeling of depth; a sense of purpose. It constitutes a great deal of the manhood that boys search for in video games. If contextualized by adults, these games can help the boy’s journey to high character development and life-purpose.
Here are some strategic ways you can move gaming at least slightly into conscious character development.
*Ask your son to teach you the game he is playing.
*Ask him to interpret the game for you, not just for a minute or two, but in great depth. *Ask him to integrate the game into the empathy and value systems you are teaching him in your family.
Here’s an example from Halo you can use as a way of utilizing the warrior’ battle for good against evil into your own value system.
“We soldiers are simple things,” the Colonel tells his troops in the movie made from the game. “We’re taught honor: honor means sacrifice, and sacrifice means death, our own or our enemy’s. In some ways, beneath it all, that’s what a soldier is really trained to do—to end God’s work.”
Using this already extant linkage in the game to life/death, soul/body, and honor/self-sacrifice, you can help build the boy’s maturation and resilience as you talk with him boy about the video game. Asking him to analyze and even debate the game with you, you can carry on this discussion with your son and add your own lessons in morality and values, spirituality, suffering, goodness and, ultimately, manhood.
Especially if your son is playing an hour of video games every weekday and two or more hours every weekend, it’s essential that you integrate video games into his conscious character and manhood maturation.
A Soldier’s Truth
A dad who did two tours with the Marines in Iraq worked with gaming this way (I’ve summarized a number of our clinical conversations here): “As you know, I came home messed up and you suggested I take the bull by the horns and talk to my 11-year-old son Cary about his video games. At first, I couldn’t even play the games without getting flashbacks. But gradually, I could, and it was a way to bond with Cary. So, I used Halo, like you suggested. It worked well because I could talk to Cary about my values.
“Like, there’s a part where the Colonel tells Commander Locke what he believes: ‘You must give your life away, so others will live in peace. These people who live on after what you carry part of your deeds with them. In their final hours, they will have to answer the question you asked in yours: with your life, would you only create death or with your death would you create life? That is my question to you, Commander Locke: how will you die and for what?’
“I asked Cary if he understood what this meant. He said, ‘Yeah, Dad, it means you will sacrifice your life so other people can have their lives. It’s like what you were doing in Iraq.’ I cried right then, right in front of him, I cried and then he cried, too. We hugged each other. I was so proud of my boy.”
As this father told me about this incident, tears came to his eyes and my own. What an amazing gift this father gave his son and that gift came through video games!
A dad or other mentor who has never been a soldier can do this with his son or the boy in his life—indeed, he must. If an early adolescent boy is playing video games that can affect brain, heart, and soul without mentoring by fathers or father-figures, manhood will be defined for the boy without real men leading the self-definition. The boy may not mature into the loving, wise, and successful man we want him to be.
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