Are Video Games Good for your Child?

At Chess Mates our students will often tell us that they’ve been playing chess at home on the computer, sometimes they’ll even tell us of other video games they’ve been playing. If you’re wondering what affects this extra screen time has on your child have a read below!

Positives

There are some benefits of video games. Often phone games and ipad apps can have benefits to logic and problem solving as they will require children to work out timing and certain patterns to succeed. These games can also help develop spacial awareness and fine motor skills as children often have to react through pushing small buttons and responding to cues. Games such as Temple Run or Age of Empires also get children thinking about resource management as they must decide when to best use the resources they have gathered.

Like the skills learned in chess, many of these things are translatable to real life outside of the game.

Negatives

Whilst appropriately rated games can be beneficial for the above reasons, it’s notable that some games do contain a lot of violence that can be bad for your child. There have been studies linking aggressive behavior back to violent video games that children are playing, especially games where children are rewarded for being violent e.g. getting extra points for killing an enemy. Video games can also have negative effects on social life where your child chooses to play them rather than see friends.

As always everything is good in moderation, and remember to always check the rating!