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Comment by randlet | Hacker News Reader

I was mouth agape through the whole article. Call me old fashioned too, but I don't want my 5 year old killing things with swords when their grasp on what is real and imaginary is so blurry. It blows my mind that most of the kids in my daughter's junior kindergarten class have seen Star Wars movies, Spiderman, and other violent movies.

I'm not against a 4 or 5 year old using a tablet for a limited account of time for interactive educational 'games' but guns and swords is well over the line.

Edit: Contra at age 6!

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When I was 4 and 5 I played with plastic swords, squirt guns and watched Power Rangers. shrug My 6 year old nephew plays Super Smash Brothers. When I was 6 I explicitly remember my friends playing Sonic and Super Mario and X-Wing/Tie-Fighter. None of them grew up to be school shooters.

I'll limit the exposure time, but I'd let my kids play contra at 6. My parents went the educational-games-only route until 6th grade, and I was shut out of a lot of social situations as a result. No desire for my kids to go through that.

"None of them grew up to be school shooters."

Please don't put implications in my post that aren't there. I'm not aware of research that suggests video games are or are not a factor in school shootings and similar events.

Letting a kid play a game about killing people with machine guns at age 6 is crazy to me. I was also shut out of social situations like seeing movies and playing video games at a young age and I imagine my children will be to. It hurt at the time sure, but life ain't always about getting what you want or doing what everyone else is.

You implied that cartoonish violence like Contra will have substantially negative psychological effects on children. I've never seen any support for that and my own experiences tell me the opposite. A quick google search shows evidence going both ways, so lacking time for an exhaustive analysis I'm sticking with my experiences.

Take my anecdotes with as big a grain of salt as you like, but analytically the benefits didn't outweigh the cons in my case. Not having access to the same video games, movies and entertainment as my peers greatly damaged my ability to form relationships at a young age. The only upside was perhaps a marginal increase in analytical thinking skills, which was easily offset by the anxiety/insecurities and resultant academic underperformance I had as a result of underdeveloped social skills. Your kids' mileage may vary.

Sure I grew up and that's all long in the past now, but that doesn't mean it was useful, justified, or harmless. When the fiancée and I decide to have kids, I intend to give them every opportunity I can within reason, that includes the resources for a vibrant social life if they want. Obviously I won't be buying them Grand Theft Auto at age 6, but Star Wars? Absolutely.

"You implied that cartoonish violence like Contra will have substantially negative psychological effects on children."

I do believe they have negative effects on children but I don't believe that extends to school shootings.

Are you sure it was a lack of video games and movies that let you to have trouble forming relationships? My anecdote is that even though I had virtually no video games (except at friends houses) or television until highschool I was still able to form (and maintain for 30+ years) friendships with my peers who had very different rules than I did, and had a full social life all through school (I do consider myself a strong introvert and have had social anxiety issues in past, but I would never point at lack of TV/games growing up as a root cause).

Like you said, neither one of us has hard data, only anecdotal stories with different outcomes for similar "media" parenting strategies.

Even if there is no negative consequence on an individual child relative to their peer group, I still believe (can't support with evidence obviously) that exposing children to violence in video games and movies is a net societal negative that I don't intend to contribute to.

edit: Just wanted to say I appreciate your perspective as it's one I hadn't even considered before and gave me some food for thought.

Fair enough, I imagine it largely depends on peer group as well. Literally everyone I had anything remotely in common with growing up played video games, watched adult-ish TV, saw PG-13+ movies, etc from a young age. My parents outright refused to let me have any of those things, and as a result no one wanted to come over and play at my house, I always sucked when playing with the other kids at birthday parties, I wasn't allowed to see any PG-13+ movies with them, etc. It got to the point where I actually started academically teaching myself the rules of video games by reading websites and strategy guides, and memorizing summaries of TV shows and movies just so I could participate in conversations at lunch. I'm not saying it was the only issue (I was meh on sports and shy in general), but it was definitely a big hurdle. Like being the only one forbidden from playing cards at a poker tournament where literally everybody else is playing.

If my peer group's interests had been more varied maybe it would have worked out differently. So I imagine it depends on the school/neighborhood.

Edit: At any rate, I appreciate your perspective as well. An upbringing without TV (let alone the rest) where it wasn't a hindrance is about as alien to me as it gets, pretty sure both my parents' families had TVs growing up. :) As it stands I see such things as ultimately harmless, but I'll admit that if I didn't experience media as such a crucial social lubricant, I'd probably strictly limit (although I'd stop short of forbidding) my kids from the more violent stuff as well, at least until they were 8+, just in case.

One aspect I find interesting about this argument is that children are actually much more cruel than adults seem to remember or realize. Kids will often expose their classmates to real violence (whether physical or psychological) at an early age and without the input of fictional violence to guide them. Of course, it depends on the specific school and I was lucky enough to grow up in a sheltered environment where this wasn't frequent.

The danger of movies and games inspiring violence seems comparatively meager. The risk of wasting time through addiction to these things is the more immediate danger.

Hell, I learned to shoot at age six, and got my first Daisy air rifle not long after. Can't say as it did me or anyone else any harm, except for the one time I bounced a ricochet off the bridge of my nose and had a welt for a couple of days - I've never so much as aimed a firearm at another human being, and that includes the air gun wars which were the occasional recreation of the more reckless among my cohort.

On the other hand, nine might've been too young to take my first deer; I've never had any particular desire to hunt since then, although if it were that or starve, I suppose I'd do the former - not that it'd be hard around here, where whitetail are abundant and have no fear of humans. It did teach me a great deal, though I might rather have learned it a few years later than when I did; on the other hand, I doubt I'd have been able to. In any case, while I certainly still eat venison when the opportunity presents, on the whole I'm still much happier to shoot deer with a camera than a rifle.

I never really noticed much one way or the other about video game guns. Seems like a lot of stew from one oyster, but I don't suppose anyone should take the word of a Mississippi Borderer brat for much of anything.

I am not "anti-gun". I don't own guns but I did grow up in rural Canada and had plenty of exposure to guns, hunting, and have enjoyed skeet and target shooting myself etc. Guns are a tool which can be useful. It's the violence and normalization of it that I'm opposed to.

I'd seen Star Wars by the time I was 5. I'd played various NES games, at least including Duck Hunt. My wife grew up around 3 brothers who included her in various things that would've made my parents blush.

You don't sound old-fashioned, so I won't call you that. I was thinking more like "alarmist". I think it's possible to harm a child through exposure to violent content, but I don't think it's as easy as you seem to. In particular, I'd consider cartoonish violence essentially harmless. My son won't be around FPSes for a number of years, but NES-style games? Can't be worse than 80s Saturday morning cartoons.

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