My Four-Year-Old Son Plays Grand Theft Auto | Hacker News Reader

My Four-Year-Old Son Plays Grand Theft Auto

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109 pointskingsley_20110 comments

As a side note, I was really disappointed that Rockstar omitted the ambulance and firefighter missions in GTA IV. The ambulance missions were one of my favorite parts of the pre-GTA4 games -- challenging and well-rewarded.

(Edit: ...and, as the article shows, these missions are some of the only pieces of the game that could be played entirely ethically -- which may be why they were removed. I'm surprised no one's created a similar driving-and-saving-lives sandbox game outside of GTA, although the taxi minigame is similar to Crazy Taxi, which may be where GTA got the idea in the first place.)

GTA is quite an old franchise, GTA 1 & 2 were both top down games. You could drive a taxi/bus and pick up people. The game was really quite fun.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Theft_Auto_2

Free download from rock* http://www.rockstargames.com/classics/

Thanks for the link, didn't know they were downloadable for free! (huge props to Rockstar).

I loved GTA2, never played 3 and beyond because I was always behind the tech curve for the moment (and fairly busy with studies).

Pretty darn old, but there was one such: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimCopter

I loved the demo for that game, but could never actually find it for sale anywhere!

Much is said about protecting children from video games, but what about other mediums (mainly TV, given its exposure)?

Any station can air some movie at 4pm featuring the good cops shooting the bad guys. Or, for instance, it is easy to be watching some news report at dinner and being exposed to something beating the horror or gore movies by points.

Aren't kids exposed since birth to the notion that violence becomes acceptable if against the bad guys? Where goes the moral of don't to others what you don't want to be done to you?

Even some very successful animated movies like Lion King end up with the bad guy being killed. Either intentionally or not, kids end up satisfied that the bad guy had what he deserved and that all become happily ever after.

I'm not for one side or the other, I just wanted to raise some questions to see what you guys think. I don't think video games are bad for children, but I agree they have to be picked appropriately for their age. But I also think we end up avoiding violence in the obvious places but letting kids completely exposed to it in another ones.

I'm not really sure where I stand on this issue but I think the argument is along the lines of: watching violence is different than role-playing violence.

Right. In addition, we attempt to socialize young men that violence is supposed to be a technique of last resort and permitted in only a narrow range of situations. (This will not endear me to some teachers of mine, but I'll say it anyhow: in those situations, it is often morally praiseworthy.)

Grand Theft Auto and company, on the other hand, depict violence as riotously good fun which is self-justifying and an appropriate response to, e.g., boredom.

Yes. You should be playing Deus Ex instead. You have a choice there.

I just want to add this: I don't know wether role-playing violent games increases violence or not. I can imagine hypotheses where it decrease violence as well as increase it. I also can imagine situations where it might have different effects at different ages. Perhaps that's part of what leads to the polarized opinion. What if role-playing violent acts increases violence in children but decreases it in teenagers?

I think the point is to not assume that it is not automatically the same as watching a movie.

>Even some very successful animated movies like Lion King end up with the bad guy being killed. Either intentionally or not, kids end up satisfied that the bad guy had what he deserved and that all become happily ever after.

This is something that I'm disturbed by. Did they really have to kill off Charles Muntz in Up and Syndrome in The Incredibles? Those guys weren't that bad.

I would keep my kid away from as much violent anything as possible, and gradually introduce critically renowned and age-appropriate entertainment as they grow up. Kind of like how I was raised I guess.

Don't get me wrong, I'm an adult who enjoys good entertainment like Sin City and Blood Meridian. I had read a lot of Mark Twain and Dickens as a kid, and those were thoroughly entertaining too. I didn't feel deprived at all. Parents just kind of suck.

Spolier alert, jerk!

I'm so sorry :(.

> Any station can air some movie at 4pm featuring the good cops shooting the bad guys.

Here in the UK there are actually quite good limits on that. I'm not sure you would, say, ever see Starsky and Hutch (the film) on at 4pm.

> Or, for instance, it is easy to be watching some news report at dinner and being exposed to something beating the horror or gore movies by points.

Honestly; I'd say that could be beneficial more than damaging. I wouldn't, obviously, recommend showing it to kids. But if they end up watching something bad at least it's real and real people have probably died. Surely that sends the right message ("hurting people is bad")

> Here in the UK there are actually quite good limits on that. I'm not sure you would, say, ever see Starsky and Hutch (the film) on at 4pm.

I'm from Portugal and here is quite usual to see some Mission Impossible, van Dame or Schwarzenegger movie on at 4pm. Actually, most of the movies aired at Saturday and Sunday afternoons are something like PG-13.

Since here there are only 4 broadcast conventional channels, and many people don't have cable, it is quite easy for kids to be exposed to such movies.

Turn it off. Largely due to crappy news and marketing. We went off cable 2 yrs ago. Public library dvds, netflix and amazon streaming, and the internet in general replaces it all.

Occasionally surprises that need explanation. YouTubing for wild turkeys. We came across a video which showed a male humping a decoy and having his head blown off a few seconds later. More about sex and death than I wanted to discuss with my 5 yr old but we got through it intact. ;)

I found this article incredibly disturbing.

Instead of plowing into the rear of the car ahead of him, he swerved to the right and popped up onto to sidewalk. In doing so, he accidently ran over a woman walking towards his oncoming car. He was incredibly ashamed of himself and profusely apologized.

I was an extremely sensitive young boy. This would have been deeply affecting to me at the time.

“It's okay. It's only a game. It's not real”, I reassured him. After a few minutes of me explaining the difference between a game and real life, he felt comfortable enough to continue playing.

Dear god.

I really hope the scene played out like:

- Child was disturbed

- Father was reassuring

- Child continued playing entirely of his own volition

And not like:

- Child was disturbed

- Father was reassuring and encouraged child to continue playing, because it's okay to kill people in a game

- Child continued playing

I understand you completely. I was chilled when I read "Its okay. It's only a game." Its true of course, but probably beyond a child's reasoning. Imagine "Its only baseball, cheat all you want". But here, its running over people.

This speaks to why people are afraid of Grand Theft Auto: it isn't intrinsically bad; it can sometimes, however, speak a lot about people playing it.

Even more so, though, it also speaks a lot that about our society that it places a lot of value on decisions people make _in a game_.

and its a lot easier to express criminal behavior within the game without any repercussion, coupling that with a young mind that hasn't grown the mental aptitude to distinguish could lead to some ugly mishap's. We have a separate child's court for all of the above reasons.

What the ... This is truly unbelievable. If the kid wants to drive cars, there are tons of games available (my three year old loves one such game on iPad). And you can't argue that it isn't "intrinsically bad" either, a lot of stuff that is OK for grownups (alcohol, nudity, coke) may be bad for kids and may cause permanent psychological damage. Do you want to risk it?

Granted, drugs can hurt kids, but I'd be surprised to find that nudity has ever been shown to cause permanent psychological damage; otherwise we'd never have made it out of the trees. Do you have any references supporting that view?

My understanding --- which I can't in any way back up --- is that exposure to nudity was pretty much the norm for most of human history, in that families lived together in single rooms.

It's the (accidentally or otherwise) killing people part that bothers me about this.

I've studiously avoided exposing my (now 10.5 and 8.5 year old) kids to sexual material because it's unpleasant for me to have to deal with the questions (though the boy's pretty much already gotten the details formally now).

But violence still bothers me.

I find it odd that sexuality and nudity are considered to be the worst things you can expose to a child. Violence, up to a point, is tolerated, but any display of sexuality is seen as adults only. Speaking directly of GTA, yes, there was some outcry over the violence contained, but the hot coffee mod received far more attention.

I've met a fair number of people who've had sex, and have had it myself, and I can't say that many have been seriously emotionally damaged because of it [1]. I've also met a few people that have taken the lives of others [2]. The damage done to someone by them killing someone else is miles away from the damage done to someone by having sex (if there even is any).

[1]: Excluding a few people I've met who have been raped. [2]: I used to work for the military.

Well, violence was the norm for most of human history, too :-) Violence is as much a part of the human psyche as sexuality.

If you start human history from, say, 2 million years ago (or even about 100K years ago, which is the assumed date for the rise of language), yes you're right. However, by the time of Greeks at last, who were big proponents of nudity (men only, of course), this behavior was not the norm, in Greek sources it is often mentioned that other nations express shock at them for their cavalier attitude.

I don't have any references from the top of my head, but I bet you wouldn't find articles describing effects of drugs on 5 year-olds, either. But this is precisely my point: we don't know for sure, but even if there's a small chance that my child's psychology will be disturbed, I don't want to risk it.

I always thought it was kind of obvious that the rating for the games meant without adult supervision. When you sit behind your kid and take care of him and stress the difference between real life and game (and do not let him play for 20 hours straight) then almost any game would be ok.

When you sit behind your kid and take care of him [...] then almost any game would be ok

I agree about your larger point (there is a huge difference between supervised and unsupervised play), but no, almost any game would not be okay for a four year old. Four is a pretty critical age - kids start grasping the concept of death for example - and really, there are a lot of games that are developmentally completely inappropriate for this age.

The sad thing is that it came down to "my kid liked driving the car". If there is one thing the gaming world isn't short of, it's kid-appropriate driving games.

Kids grow up so fast - why rush it? Let them play the kiddie games now, there will be lots of time for GTA later.

> If there is one thing the gaming world isn't short of, it's kid-appropriate driving games.

I think you'd be hard pressed to find a current gen sandbox driving game that is suitable for children. I think the only one I can think of off-hand would be Test Drive: Unlimited (which is a great game, btw, and probably more suitable for the child in this article).

There's probably more Need For Speed games or Mario Kart clones that I can think of, but very few driving games that are not focused on winning a race.

Thinking back a few years, the Crazy Taxi-type games are also good for children, although a good representation from the genre hasn't really been seen.

Yeah I agree there aren't many sandbox driving games per se, but many race games have open modes, or modes that can be played as open (eg. the Crash Team Racing time trial modes).

The problem I have with GTA is not that the Kid! Is! Ruined! by playing it in the context described, but that once you give it to them you can't take it away - and in another year or so, that kid is going to figure out that there really is a way to properly play the game.

But yes, there is the bigger problem of many gamers wanting to introduce their kids to games and there isn't a whole lot of really optimal material out there.

I remember the "Stunts!" game which let you customize your tracks... it was huge fun when I was a child.

Here it is on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stunts_%28video_game%29

Awesome. It was actually called "4D" on my old 386, and I haven't thought about that game in years. I spent countless hours building tracks and driving on them when I was 11 or 12 years old.

Indeed. And your 4 year old won't care about the graphics.

Having just played Dantes Inferno (Which to be honest I was surprised that if got through the OFLC here in Aus) -- I can state that there are definately games that deserve their Mature Rating (and an R Rating if we could get one here)

How is this Hacker News? This belongs on Reddit.

I thought it was an interesting insight into a real child's mind, as opposed to the usual fearmongering that goes with such games usually.

I thought it was cool that the child used his will against the overwhelming thrust of the game in an unconscious manner and won. If it is possible for the negative images and activity have a negative impact on his future life, then I'd argue that his actual heroic actions inside the game portend well for his future.

I won't cry if this gets flagged but I like any HN discussion that touches on parenthood, because it's another experience besides coding and entrepreneurship that I might share with people here.

..and provides for a classic hackers' sparring session: hands-on experience in one corner vs. those who've read all about it in the other.

I think the conversation about this post is considerably more interesting and enlightening than what you would be likely to see from the same post on reddit.

I agree, the conversation was fairly interesting, but the problem with the news feed widening its focus is that the site becomes interesting to a wider variety of people, with a tendency to regress towards the mean.

So when he turns 8 and starts wasting innocent bystanders for fun, do you take the game away?

I thought the point of the article was that the kid didn't waste innocent bystanders. In fact, he apologized for it when he accidentally did it. I'm sure if he keeps playing it one day he'll do the missions and be exposed to the bad stuff, but by then I'm sure he'd be able to distinguish between game and real life.

He didn't waste innocent bystanders during the particular play session(s) the blog post was documenting. True.

But that's irrelevant and distinct from the notion of whether he will be more likely to do it at some future point in life, or do other related actions which result from a lack of empathy for other human beings, or a lack of understanding of negative consequences, or the permanance of harm in the real world.

I hear a lot of black-vs-white arguments in debates around this issue, but the problem is that it's not about black or white states or actions. Yes, having a 4 year old play GTA will not instantly turn him into a monster. And a kid can become a monster without ever playing GTA. Neither of those data points disproves a range of other possible negative effects that have shades of gray impact in the real world.

> He didn't avoid these things because I told him he counldn't try them. It just never occurred to him to commit these acts.

Does the game cause kids to go bad or is the game simply a litmus test for evil? The little baby kid didn't waste bystanders because the game doesn't tell you to do that. Perhaps your first instinct is to kill innocent bystanders when you think of sandbox style worlds... but for this kid apparently it's not. Even if it was, the game wouldn't be at fault. I'm pretty sure even if he did the missions, and understood the dialogue, he wouldn't be made to do such things because the missions don't usually have you kill innocent people.

I posted this here because I think the actual actions of the child, against overwhelming odds, are probably a more credible indicator of its future than any images of filth he may have encountered. If you believe that playing this game and seeing hookers and blow will turn you into a delinquent, then what this kid did should turn him into IronMan.

I think about this all the time. 2 boys 3 and 6 yrs old. I cringed a bit when I saw the title because it made me think of the term 'alterna-dad' and of a style of parenting in which children become accessories and 'buddies' to their extended adolescent parents. Sport matching mohawks, etc, etc.

But the article was nothing like that. It is short but the feeling I got was of true exploration and of forging a real relationship. (Another HN post of the past few days talked about how you have +/- 10 yrs to connect with yr kid). It also reminded me (as other posters noted) of that SouthPark where they all play WOW and meet Randy in game. Or the classic 'Chinpokemon'. Two really well done episodes - in both cases parents wade through unfamiliar territory to meet their kids and understand them better. Not simply ban the game.

There is danger in letting your chidren do certain things. The impulse to bubblewrap them is strong. I catch my breath everytime they do things like walk with me out on our balcony (17th floor), ride the scooter in the skatepark, climb on the rocks in the park across from our apartment, etc. But I consciously hold myself back - watching them but not rushing in to stop them. This week end my 3 yr old got punched full in the face by a 5 yr old. I held back for a count of 10 to let him deal with it as he wanted to and then comforted him a bit and broght him back so he could feel safe playing around this kid.

The point is to show them experientially that you trust them - and that you are in the background to help them if things get scary. I felt that vibe from this writer and applaud that.

In truth I have no idea of what I am doing. I use my intuition as a guide and hope I am right. What he says about the ESRB is spot on. If - as a parent - you need a school, govt agency or rating agency to tell you what is safe for your kid - then you are screwed. You need to go through it with your child and see for yourself.

You can get good advice from individuals - teachers, other parents, certain writers - but not from agencies and bureacracies.

As a parent dealing with impact of media in general is a challenge. For the past 2 yrs we went off cable tv and started to rely completely on the internet/ public library/ netflix for movies etc. I have held off on getting Wii/ x-box, etc in favor of PC based games. They have both watched tons of anime and comics (particularly stuff like Miyazaki Hayako (sp?) and the Avatar series). They both love Futurama - which might be too adult at times for them. I will have to explain 'death by snoo-snoo' one of these days.

My older son has learned to really enjoy some of the games that an Ubuntu distribution has to offer - things like Wormux, OpenSonic, BattleTanks. He has looked over my sholder as I have played some of the Doom emulations on the android or the Quake-like games on Ubuntu.

From hacker news I found out about the Wolfire free bundle and he fell in love with the Samorost series. He cried when it was done and drew a big picture of what he thought the next episode should be.

More recently on my wife's computer (WinXP) I downloaded Steam and setup the free version of Portal and bought a Tower Defense game to play.

Every time we take the subway or wait somewhere my wife and/or I whip out the gPhone and let the two of them play android games.

We try to limit this to certain times of the week etc. because of the vague fear that media will completely saturate their lives.

It is not the violence alone that gives me pause. I knwo experientially how absorbing a good game is (thinking of days past playing Half-Life or Diablo, etc).

I want them both to enjoy good media and I am loosely overlapping anime, movies and games because I feel like there is power in the imagery of soemthing like Half-Life or Miyazaki's "Princess Mononoke" which affects you deeply.

What often pisses me off are crappy movies in which the point is simply to sell a lifestyle. I hate movies like "Shark Tales" or "Madagascar" and I cant say exactly why. There are funny bit parts but the whole thing feels like it is in the service of what the philosopher Adorno referred to as the "Culture Industry". I find those movies more disturbing than somethign with more overt violence.

In a very interesting way I think this goes back to Plato and his fear of 'poetry' by which he included dramatic arts. It was the fear of the power of images. We have reached the point where video games and anime have reached a complexity and depth of imagery that they have a life of their own.

I know myself that these things affect me differently. I am trying to see through my sons' eyes to see how they are affected. At times it feels dangerous - like letting them speed ahead on their little bikes on the city sidewalk - but what this guy is doing is right. Watch them in the background, ready to bolt after them - let them know that you trust them and that you are there to help deal with the scary parts - let them experience it and learn from them as they reflect their experience back to you.

Plato on images: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-rhetoric/

Culture Industry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_industry

Parent of a 9yr old boy here.

> In truth I have no idea of what I am doing. I use my intuition as a guide and hope I am right.

The problem is, for most people, intuition doesn't do very well in raising kids. Experience does. That's what bugs me about humans in our current stage of development. Each generation learns things and most of it is not passed on to the next generation. Every single one of my peers got squat from their parents in terms of "this is how it works, pay attention".

I definitely feel like I know a LOT more now, and much of my intuition was wrong.

I will say that I have a tendency to want my child to grow up too fast. The other day I was eyeing Blade Runner on the shelf and kept asking myself if he was old enough. It's rated R and there's a lot of violence. My son doesn't like violence yet, so that made it a little easier. (This wasn't an intuitive issue, it was about my desire. My intuition was to not let him.)

Overprotection is a real problem with today's kids. I see it everywhere I look, even in my own house. My spouse's intuition is to over-protect. It's nearly impossible to fight against that.

Well said: ...Each generation learns things and most of it is not passed on to the next generation. Every single one of my peers got squat from their parents in terms of "this is how it works, pay attention".

Blade Runner is an excellent choice for this discussion. A really good movie, something that remains with you long after. In terms of scary violence - that early tense scene where the android is being tested might be over the top - but the rest is just Star-Warsy gun battles where no one gets their head blown off...

Is it really that much more violent than prime time TV?

Lots of murky,scary suspenseful scenes.

I guess the counter argument is always - 'there will be time to watch this in the future'. But it is an individual decision not one for the esrb. Depends on the kid, I think.

On overprotection. I ran across a reference within the last year to 'free-range parenting'. Didnt read the book but got a good chuckle out of the amazon review and the idea in general.

I live in a NJ city about 1 mile west of the Empire State Bldg. So I am in the crucible of NYC-metro competitiveness which insinuates itself into everyday life. Kids taking 2 or 3 different language classes, multiple sports, music - all before they are 4 yrs old.

And insane over-protectiveness at times. A neighbor with 2 boys 9 and 7 yrs old, lets them walk 6 blocks to school. Which I somewhat agree with. Not sure I will be able to do that at the time but it has made me think about this issue in general.

The biggest problem with over-protectiveness in general is that I think kids absorb the fact that you dont trust them. In fact you are thinking of the murderers and molesters and drunk drivers but the kid thinks you dont trust him/her.

The movie/ novel "The Road" deals with this on an extreme level

I think this will inevitably happen in adolescence - some kind of "I'm old enough" / "No you're not" discussion. Seems like it is better to develop alot of trust before that happens.

> And insane over-protectiveness at times. A neighbor with 2 boys 9 and 7 yrs old, lets them walk 6 blocks to school. Which I somewhat agree with. Not sure I will be able to do that at the time but it has made me think about this issue in general.

Indeed. We've come a long way, when letting your kids walk to school is something out of the ordinary.

Does everyone here believe this guy? The guy spins a good tale, but I seriously doubt this happened. It is at the best an elaboration.

To those of you who are all for this kid playing GTA-

Would you feel differently if this was Manhunt 2? Or would that be totally cool as well.

I think he is an idiot. What a way to ruin a child.

I think the author is dangerously naive because young children, much more so than adults, have a hard time distinguishing between the real world and one's imagination. For them, the border is much more fluid and harder to see.

And it's not like we're talking about a 14 year old playing D&D here with heroes and castles and dragons, oh my, but rather a 4 year old with cops, hookers, pimps, drugs, car chases, mugging and vandalism.

How do you know you aren't just a child with an overactive imagination who think's he's an adult? Since you say a child couldn't reliably tell the difference...

It's really dehumanizing to take a very large group of people and basically say they are incapable of decent thought like you and need to be controlled.

[edit: added the word "reliably"]

My guess is that the answer to your rhetorical question is "science".

Which science?

Developmental psychology.

Avoid exposing preschoolers to violent media and video games. It's correlated with increased aggression and poorer judgement. It's also --- and here I'll have a harder time citing sources --- cruel. I felt bad for the little boy when he felt bad about "running someone over". There was no reason to expose him to this kind of emotional confusion.

It is not "dehumanizing" to suggest that a 4 year old doesn't have the same cognitive function as a 14 year old.

Even if I accept that it's correlated, that doesn't mean the exposure is bad in any way. Games can be correlated to aggressiveness but also reduce aggressiveness. Correlation isn't causation.

It's correlated with increased aggression and poorer judgement.

And for the love of Dr. Spock, don't let them play Cops and Robbers, either!

How peer-reviewed were Spock's conclusions?

We don't even need to cite "science."

Just having been a child at one time, and now an adult, and seen and interacted with children, should give plenty of experiential evidence consistent with my original comment's claim. This is really not rocket science or esoteric: it's actually pretty much part of everyday common sense for a lot of adults, especially for anybody that is a parent or who has taken care of children professionally. No academic paper citing is needed.

exercise: read your 2nd sentence. now read again my 1st 2 sentences. compare and contrast. :)

EDIT: after this post you edited yours to add "reliably". Good, that loosens it up and you may no longer be in logical error.

Exercise: explain, in English, what your point is supposed to be.

exercise: it's good for you

but seriously, my original comment contained my point, and was in English. I'm now done with this thread. :)

Joking? I'll bite anyways...

There has been myriad research detailing the adverse effects of children (aka developing humans) viewing violence, sex, drugs, etc. I think four year-olds safely qualify as developing. If stuff like this isn't alarming enough, consider a more extreme example like the two year old in Indonesia who smokes a couple packs of cigarettes per day http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/asiapcf/05/31/indonesia.smokin... . You're hurting these kids' chances (of living a healthy life/of relating to their peers/of being successful/ etc)

For those hounding me for citations, here's something I quickly rustled up:

From an economist: http://www.scribd.com/doc/22743802/Learning-Violence-Young

From a social psychologist: http://www.scribd.com/doc/2038214/Video-Game-Violence

From a the Institution of Youth Development in Washington DC: http://www.scribd.com/doc/33292276/Violence

I don't think it's fair to compare playing a video game in which one does bad things with actually smoking in real life.

As to the studies, I've read some such studies and deemed them invalid or unscientific. Can you cite one that you would stand behind as rigorous and accurate?

[Edit: Can you site ONE study that you will STAND BEHIND? One you've read in full. Not three studies you just googled. I can google studies too...]

You are on very shaky ground with this line of argument, which attempts to cast aspersions at basically all of psychology because of controversies unrelated to the the issue we're actually talking about.

Yes, there are questions about whether playing "Mature"-themed games actually causes problems for teenagers.

Yes, there is an effort, probably ill-conceived, to restrict access to "Mature"-themed games for teenagers.

We are not talking about teenagers; we're talking about a 4 year old.

One simple axis of argument to observe here is the Harvard (Kutner & Olson) vs. Iowa (Anderson) debate; Kutner's book points out that much of the psych research is methodologically flawed. But both Kutner and Anderson agree that exposure to very violent games is associated with increased aggression. Kutner just doesn't want to see all games demonized for all pre-adult age groups.

You've used the weasel words "associated with" which are common in psych studies.

One thing "associated with" does NOT mean is "caused by". It's consistent with, say, people first becoming aggressive and then taking up violent games afterwards. And it's consistent with taking their violent games away from them making them more, not less, aggressive.

Anyway, just because two people from a debate agree doesn't make something true. And just because psychological studies are flawed for irrelevant reasons doesn't mean they aren't also flawed for relevant reasons. Feel free to cite a study you'd like to stand behind...

Something's gone pear shaped in this discussion if I have to weasel my way through it. Sorry. I'd just like to point out again that it's not like we're arguing about anthropogenical global warming here. Developmental psychology, along with (I hope) common sense, suggests very strongly that 4 years olds are not 14 year olds.

I've cited researchers (both with litanies of studies) downthread.

Developmental psychology, along with (I hope) common sense, suggests very strongly that 4 years olds are not 14 year olds.

Which cleverly dodges the question at hand. Cartoon violence and/or sex: harmful to kids or not?

The big problem with most of the psych studies indicating "harm," for some definition of harm, is in the controls. Typically they'll sit some kids down in front of an Xbox for a measured period of time, and monitor them for signs of aggression and aberrations in empathy. The control group consists of another group of kids sitting in the next room playing with crossword puzzles.

The control groups in these studies should consist of kids running around outdoors playing Cowboys and Indians, but that never, ever seems to occur to the psych majors. It's almost as if they initiated their studies to demonstrate a preordained conclusion, or something.

> You've used the weasel words "associated with" which are common in psych studies.

That's what psych studies do - they establish correlations. People are not crash-test dummies that can be produced identically in quantities and experimented on. Different people respond to experiences differently, but that doesn't mean you can't say that those experiences are generally harmful or generally beneficial.

Nobody claims that psychology has the predictive power of physics, but that doesn't mean it has nothing useful to say.

> That's what psych studies do - they establish correlations.

And that's why they are useless. Because correlation isn't causation. Or in other words, because "aggressiveness is correlated to GTA" is fully compatible with GTA reducing aggressiveness. Whenever correlation studies try to give conclusions, they are reliably compatible with the opposite of their conclusions, so they are just nonsense...

Sports participation is linked to aggression (for example, http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/118735417/abstrac... and http://hk.humankinetics.com/jsep/viewarticle.cfm?aid=8936)

What if increased aggression is good for you? I seem to remember another study about men with long middle fingers (indicating high testosterone levels) having a significantly higher income.

Naturally the rest of society wants us to be docile, but it is not necessarily what is good for you. Also, the people with the guns usually win and set down the law. "We can talk about everything" is a lie.

Do you have kids?

citation needed

Start here, with a semi-skeptical take, and follow the names to the researchers websites and to SCHOLAR.GOOGLE.COM. There's controversy, but this isn't fringe science.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Theft_Childhood

What do you mean by fringe science? The authors in that wikipedia article claim most studies have been flawed, and even their own can't show causation.

I also still remember being a kid, which gives me a somewhat biased opinion, I guess.

My own non-scientific guess would be that peer pressure is more important. Personally I was never much into watching gruesome movies, for example, but for a while it seemed to be a test of courage among other kids my age. So essentially kids might have been watching more gruesome stuff than they really liked because of peer pressure. Or they really liked that stuff - then I wonder why?

Also as kids we loved Wild West stories, would dress up as Cowboys and Native Americans and shoot around with toy guns. The totem pole and the associated torturing were a particular favorite. We never mistook play for reality, though (no real torturing).

Yeah, me too, but that didn't happen when you were FOUR, right?

Let me disclaim right here that the kind of bad parenting on display in this article is of approximately the same valence as the bad parenting I inflict on my kids on a weekly basis. I'm just saying it made me queasy is all. The kid, who is clearly awesome, is going to be fine.

Speaking of smoking, I wonder what's the author's opinion regarding alcohol. I and other friends have drunk (or better said tasted) wine and beer since we were kids (less than 10 years old) and we haven't become alcoholics. Sure, I know a couple of people who drink a bit too much at parties, but still, I don't think that forbidding them to drink until they were 21 would have avoided this. If someone wants to shoot himself in the foot, I don't see how some law can stop this.

I think this is true. There is even ample evidence that relaxed approaches to alcohol does not have an adverse affect. In France, for example, it is (or was) pretty common to offer children small amounts of wine or beer at a relatively young age.

My family had a similar approach and I turned out ok :)

regarding your 2nd paragraph: let's say I were to make the claim that most babies can't walk or talk well, take care of defecatory body functions well, etc. Would you think that was dehumanizing to them? Are you saying babies should not be controlled? Let babies roam wild in the streets, in the forests, on the highways? Have you ever came into contact with babies, let alone children? :)

I for one think we must control babies. The risk that they might rise up and overthrow us is just too great to ignore. :P

> Are you saying babies should not be controlled?

Most of the time a parent and his child agree about who should control something. The parent pays for the baby's food and the baby doesn't object. This is not "control" in the relevant sense because the baby prefers it be this way. And other times the baby decides on the location of his rattle. He exercises some control over his life and his parent is fine with that.

The interesting case -- and the one where the notion of an adult controlling a child is most relevant and meaningful -- is when there is a disagreement. Then if the adult, say, unplugs the TV to prevent the child playing GTA, against the child's will, he is taking control of the situation and exercising control over the child's life.

A wide variety of excuses are given for adults controlling children as a react to disagreements. One particularly generic and offensive one is "kids don't think so good". This sometimes takes more specific forms, e.g. "kids don't think so good on the specific issue of differentiating between virtual reality and reality" (btw, ironically, most adults are extremely bad at that same issue in some different forms, e.g. they don't really understand that when they "see" a chair the visual image is a VR rendering inside their head).

Anyway, here is a fact that, ahem, adults often mess up and which many young children intuitively seem to grasp: if we accept that the ratio of stuff adults are right about to stuff children are right about is 1000:1, it does not follow that in a disagreement the adult is right (or probably right). This is because disagreements do not happen in a random sample of cases. Disagreements only happen when both parties judge that they have relevant information that the other hasn't properly taken into account.

In disagreements, it's nothing but sheer unadulterated arrogance (and irrationality) to assume one is right. And to attribute this assumption to demographic characteristics of the other person is dehumanizing.

I think a lot of what your saying is thoughtful and worth considering, but relevant mostly to kids at around age 10. Prior to 7, FMRI suggests that kids don't even have a real concept of empathy yet (which btw has profound impact on how you handle discipline, in directions I think you might find congenial).

But again we're talking about a 4 year old. It just shouldn't be controversial (or, worse, acrimonious) to suggest that the rules are different for preschoolers.

I'm glad you're open to treating 10yos in a rational and non-dehumanizing way. That'd be a great start.

But I don't see anything about being younger than that which changes what constitutes a rational way to approach a disagreement.

FMRI studies suggest that children prior to the age of 7 don't have a fully developed (or useful) concept of empathy.

Therefore, when your 4 year old eats your 5 year old's cookie, it isn't productive to demand that the 4 year be held to account for "how it would make YOU feel if HE ate YOUR cookie". It's confusing and irrelevant to the child.

Since parents for most of the last century have used exactly those words on little kids, I have illustrated a disagreement between me and a hypothetical parent, and resolved it with a very, very basic finding of developmental psychology.

That disagreement is not very relevant to whatever it is our disagreement is, but it does illustrate that the logic you're deploying isn't... um... controlling? here.

Incidentally, isn't it a little bit weird that I'm taking this side of a discussion against the author of the "Don't Fight" iPhone application? =)

I don't think morality is about empathy. I think the "how would you feel if..." arguments are bad. So I wouldn't consider this a significant problem, if true.

I don't know if you've read through my app, but I think you will find it's consistent with my views in general, and thoroughly fails to advocate empathy.

I would be more inclined to point out that if there is a disagreement about a cookie, it is in everyone's interests to use a truth seeking process to find out the right thing to do. Then everyone can win. With fighting, someone loses, and it will sometimes be you, and even if you win the other guy uses his creativity against you instead of cooperatively.

I think most of morality can be learned or deduced by applying empathy. Morality and empathy are closely related.

Like the Golden Rule, for example. Do I like being slapped? If no, don't slap. Do I like to be stolen from? If no, don't steal from others. And so on. Empathy towards others goes a long way towards being moral -- even if one has to "fake" it at times.

i'm not sure i like your basis for morality.

by your standards, if i like being slapped is it moral for me to slap others?

No, his "basis for morality" does not say that.

The science states that they don't understand empathy until age 7. I would hazard an alternative explanation: it takes years of training to become empathetic.

Most skills do take a long time to master.

xeno, I think you're being too philosophical about this.

But I like philosophy :-)

And I like truth.

Feel free not to read my stuff though, shrug.

Truth is a good thing, agreed. But I'd say that philosophy is an ineffective way at arriving at truth, however. Science, logic and mathematics are much better at it.

Philosophy also suffers from some crippling flaws that Wittgenstein pointed out.

lol, witt was a terrible philosopher (if one can even call him a philosopher -- he did not have philosophical problems). if you try reading Popper instead you'll find philosophy is rather better.

epistemology is a very important and useful field. at least i think so, feel free to post or cite a criticism. i'll accept that most of the rest of philosophy is a bad signal to noise ratio.

A two year old is not capable of understanding that an object doesn't cease to exist when they can no longer see it. This is why peek-a-boo is enthralling to babies.

There are similar developmental challenges faced by the human brain over it's lifetime. It never stops changing. At some point, we draw a line and say that it is grown up, but it's a blurry line.

There is nothing de-humanizing about taking a group of people (based on age) and saying they are incapable of certain types of thought. Adding the word "decent" as you did would be adding subjectivity and moral judgement, however the parent post didn't say that.

You might not remember it, but you also struggled with certain concepts: object permanence, abstract thinking, reasoning. Assuming a child is the same thing mentally as an adult is a huge mistake. We may grant them the same basic human rights, but they are absolutely not capable of the same level of thought. That's why we have a different word for them: children.

At the age of 3 or 4 children are just starting to understand the concept of "same" and "different".

Here's some information about childhood milestones:

http://www.healthychildren.org/English/ages-stages/toddler/P...

I agree and being the father of a five year old I experience every day how little idea I have about how he understands things. As an example he is currently struggling with the idea of things being relative, so while I watch the world cup and say that one of the teams playing are a good soccer team, he will respond that then the other team must not be good. For some reason he really needs this to be true for his world to make sense.

There are just so many learned realities that we as adults assume but which kids have no idea about, to the extent that we have no freaking clue about how they see the world.

Absolutely.

Sometimes I think about what the difference between an 18 year old and a 24 year old's brain is. Or, perhaps the difference between a 30 year old and a 50 year old person.

I think we have an intuitive understanding of it and it shows up in a lot of public policy debate. People talk about ageism and old people "not getting it" and older folks have a similar "kids these days" feeling. I wonder what part of that is simply due to differing world views caused by differing brain capabilities. Nobody seems to talk about that when we debate these things. I'm sure its being studied.

The psychological capabilities of young children are remarkably consistent and well established in the literature. It's not unreasonable to make generalizations about them.

What exactly is the danger, though - that the 4 year old will try to steal a police car the next day?

I think there are lots of different studies. One I heard about years ago was that kids tend to have an individual level of violence in stories/movies that they want to tolerate. So it is questionable if the kid would seek out the violent situations.

After all, he was not playing alone. Sure, in GTA you could probably walk into a brothel and meet prostitutes. But so you could in the Real World TM. Perhaps like in the real world, not much bad stuff would happen in GTA if parents are watching.

No. The danger is that the child is going to:

* Be harmed emotionally by the events, possibly in subtle ways; for instance, the child will have nightmares. Will nightmares permanently damage the kid? No. But neither does stubbing your toe. You don't wish that on a kid either.

* As a result of that, or because of learning the wrong message from the experience, the child will act out in ways that will (a) harm other kids and (b) (more importantly) get the kid into needless trouble.

No, he's not going to go steal a car or run over an old lady. Nobody is saying that. But I'm going to stick up for the original poster who, like me, was apparently made queasy by the idea of exposing a FOUR YEAR OLD to GRAND THEFT AUTO.

Freely admitted: my first reaction to this story was, "aw, that's so cute." The negative stuff crept up on me.

I don't disagree with your overall point, but I think you picked a bad example.

While I wouldn't wish for my kid to stub a toe at any given moment, I also wouldn't want her to grow up without the experience of toe-stubbing - it teaches a valuable lesson (be careful of where you put your feet!).

Life is going to deal out enough stubbed toes without us having to arrange for the occurrence, right?

But isn't that exactly one of the reasons to play games: to be able to explore dangerous things in safety? Maybe somebody should devise a toe stubbing game...

Soccer?

I don't know enough about GTA, but it seems as if he was able to play without severely bad experiences. Granted, running over the lady was questionable, but apparently his dad managed to convince him it was a game.

Also, not sure how much can be done against nightmares. The imagination is there - you can't always predict what scary ideas it might create.

That said, there are probably lots of other things to do besides playing GTA...

On the account of nightmares. My first prolonged exposure to violent video games did result in nightmares. I was round 6 at the time and have spent two hours playing Battle Chess.

However, many other events result in nightmares. And I reckon that gaming is a worthwhile cause.

I'd sure like to see some peer-reviewed scientific literature, where the peers in question aren't all members of evangelical Christian pressure groups, that documents the 'harm' done to young children by media.

If children are that easily traumatized, how can any child grow up to become a healthy adult in a real war zone?

See upthread. The Department of Psychology at Iowa State and Harvard Medical School Center for Mental Health aren't evangelical Christian pressure groups. Let's not bring culture war into this.

Oh, the answer to your second question might be sometimes they can't.

I don't think they can grow up in a war zone and not being screwed up if the war is real enough (the US is technically a warzone with Iraq, but it isn't something that is ever going to matter).

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