Nagging parents push children to videogames

Updated on: Tuesday, September 13, 2011

According to recent study, if your kids play a lot of videogames, chances are that they do it because you nag them too much.

Nagging parents seem to drive their kids into playing videogames. The study, which surveyed more than 500 students from 20 middle schools, is one of the first to link parental behaviour with kids' videogame playing.

Researchers from the Michigan State University found that the more children perceived their parents' behaviour as negative ('nags a lot') and the less monitoring they did, the more the children played videogames.

The next step, said Linda Jackson, who led the study, is to find out what's fuelling their videogame behaviour, the Proceedings of the 2011 World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia & Telecommunications reports.

"Does a parent's negative interactions with their child drive the kid into the world of videogames, perhaps to escape the parent's negativity?" said Jackson, according to a Michigan statement.

"Or, alternatively, does videogame playing cause the child to perceive his or her relationship with the parent as negative?"

The larger part of the study in which Jackson and colleagues are involved in exploring the effects of technology use on children's academic performance, social life, psychological well-being and moral reasoning.

Nagging parents push children to videogames

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