The newest addiction

The newest addiction involves an act or behavior I’m sure most of you have never thought about but, according to the scientific experts, it is just as real and deadly as being addicted to meth or cocaine. It’s an addiction to video games.

Most of us have known about obsessive-compulsive behavior for a long time and, consequently, we’re no stranger to it or its qualities. It involves becoming “hooked” on a behavior to the point that it literally takes over our lives because it’s all we think about. Video gaming certainly meets the definition of obsessive-compulsive behavior for those who are susceptible to that malady.

Deaths actually occur due to compulsive video game behavior, not because of the game itself, but because of one’s dependency on it. There are volumes of anecdotal evidence of people who get up in the morning, play video games until bedtime that night, often passing up the chance to even eat a meal and then wake up the next morning to do the same thing. This leads to such an imbalance in a person’s life that he/she realizes they’re past the point of no return and that suicide is the only answer. That’s where death enters the picture.

I want to make a comparison between young people of today and young people of my generation. It’s not done to crow about my generation being superior to the generations that have followed, it’s just a comparison between us. We had very little obsessive-compulsive behavior when I was growing up. In fact I can honestly say I had never heard of it. I believe that was due to our parents’ involvement in our lives.

They knew what was good for us and what was bad for us and they were determined to make sure we did good things with our lives and stayed away from bad things. So they knew what we were doing practically every waking minute of the day. They would not let us be seduced into a bad behavior, regardless of how much we wanted to be. They even picked our friends for us, a practice that was not universally praised back then and is certainly not today. The parent’s philosophy however was that a person is known by the company he keeps and if you are friendly with people with bad reputations, you’ll get one too. Even though that sounds logical, I don’t know if it’s true or not because I never had the chance to find out for myself and at the young and tender age I currently occupy with my parents and relatives long gone, I still find myself making the same choices for the same reasons.

Parents in those days also realized that they had the rest of their chld’s life to be friends with them and that wasn’t a prerequisite when a child was growing up. Our parents weren’t our friends. They were our overseers, placed with us to guide us, direct us and make sure we stayed on the correct path whether we wanted to or not. That has changed significantly in the last fifty years to a need on the part of parents to be their child’s best friend. When you’re trying to be best friends with someone, you allow them to do things they shouldn’t be doing because you don’t want to do anything to alienate them or take a chance of them not liking you. Parents fall into the same category. When a youngster senses that all he has to do is throw a fit or act like he’s withholding his love from a parent, he’ll eventually get what he wants because his parents are dependent on him liking them for their own self esteem.

That’s usually a death knell of parent-child relationships because all of the power in the relationship transfers from the parent to the child. That’s where we are today. Parents let their kids do things ours would have never thought about doing because they want to be friends with them. And so if they want to play video games every waking moment, the parent allows them to do that because they believe it makes them happy. And then when behaviors and emotional disorders start to appear based on their addiction to playing video games, sometimes ending with the worst possible outcome, the parents attempt to blame everyone but themselves.

A lot of pressure is being placed on the video game makers to make their games less addictive but if you’re one of those who are calling for that, I think you’ve missed the point. We’ve always had things in society that were bad for us, even deadly for us and it’s always been up to parents to sort those things out by pointing their children in one direction and not another. It’s not the video game maker or creator who’s at fault here for your child’s addiction, it’s you the parent.

And the sooner we realize that, the sooner we can impact in a positive way on this problem. Be a parent to your child, you have the rest of his/her life to be their friend.