D'oh! Videogames and AS/ADHD study

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I think you might become my son's hero if he ever met you!

Didn't read the abstract, but when my kids were younger, it was watching too much tv at a young age that caused autism. It seemed very clear to me that having autism caused a lot of tv watching in my house. And I encouraged it. It is predictable, and can be rewatched to catch what you missed. It's non threatening because you don't have to take action and many of them break complex things down into some pretty straightforward concepts. Both of my kids learned their numbers and letters from tv. My daughter learned how to read. Both of my kids were able to learn social norms through cartoons. The toddler-focused ones are really geared toward rudimentary social understanding. My daughter still remembers one from Nai Hao Kai Lan "When you cause a problem, here's what you must do: First you say you're sorry then you help to fix it too!" She also learned that bragging was cheering for yourself too much. And then some bear broke everything down into 3 simple steps and THAT was like magic for her.

I also have a GameCube, but it needs new cables. I'm absolutely flattered when you said I think you might become my son's hero. I found what you said about bragging very interesting. I'm assuming what you meant by bragging was when young kids who play video games around other kids let alone siblings picking on each other like this:

"Hahahaha! I have a better Pokemon than you!" kind of bragging and teasing.

Remember also, that in addition to each child being different, as you said, different places are different. Not every location has non-competitive sports clubs as an option. Where I live, they get very competitive very quickly. The one year or two, that they have t-ball, was at an age where my son would never have been able to even deal with the waiting and the minimal amount of rule following involved. If we were to try sports now, forget about it. He would not be allowed to play and the kids would be vicious if he were allowed to play and ruin their season with his horrible motor skills. (Plus he still cannot follow rules well, or deal with downtime well.)

We are trying to organize a technology club, but I don't know if that will work. If it doesn't we will figure something out, if he wants to be around kids, but it will have to be very structured and special-interest oriented.

We have no behavioral issues relating to screen time, and I am grateful for it. He learns more from PBS Kids and the Internet, than from his teacher.

My oldest never had a problem with waiting, and seemed to enjoy getting out around the ball park, so he played T-ball at age 5 (even though the normal age here is 3 and 4). Then at 6 he wanted to play again, and that year they had just started a new transition thing where they throw two balls at the kids with the pitching machine and then let them hit off the tee. The kids were all still just kind of lollygagging around trying to have fun. The parents however were already acting like rabid animals. At that age he had to have someone stand by him to get him to look toward the in-field (yeah definitely stick a kid like him in right field), which was kind of okay as they did have it standard to have an extra adult out there for all the kids, but he also couldn't throw a ball very well--as in lucky if it went more than five feet. They didn't even keep score in this game, the kids could swing at the tee as many times as they wanted, and parents were hanging on the fence slobbering mad that my kid's little five foot throw was making their 1st baseman look bad!

We were done with baseball at that point. It went similarly with the non-competitive basketball teams for little kids. Starting in 5th grade they started keeping score, so after 4th we were done. People still thought it was cute when the only basket he made all year was on the wrong end of the court when no score was being kept, and only one set of parents were pushing their kid like they had some misguided idea that a kid in the 25th percentile of height could be a professional basketball player. I seriously doubted they would find it so cute when the score was being kept.

There is a non-competitive set of teams for soccer, baseball, maybe basketball for kids with disabilities that I know about, but it is 60 miles from here, so too far to drive several times a week. I wish it was closer, or even if there was some league for all older kids that didn't keep score and everyone got to hit no matter how it took.

My son would love to have every kind of gaming gadget known to man. Right now he really wishes he had a game boy. Though his handheld devices seem to have taken a back seat to minecraft right now.

Regarding the bragging, for my daughter it was helpful because she used to be a horrible loser and an even worse winner. She used to say things like "I'm the smartest!" or "I'm the best!" and go WAY overboard with it. When I told her that was bragging and that other people didn't like it, she couldn't understand because from where she stood, it was true. But in conceptualizing it as "cheering for yourself too much" somehow it helped her understand that it wasn't about being truthful or not truthful, it was about...well...cheering for yourself too much. And I would have never thought of explaining it that way. I was trying to explain it by saying that it was rude to say you were better than everyone else, but she couldn't understand how being truthful could be rude, and in her mind, if she won the game, it was because she was better than everyone else.

InThisTogether, that is a really smart way to look at it. We struggle with this, ourselves. It has improved, but he really does not understand why bragging is bad. He does know it hurts people's feelings, so he makes an effort.

Yes, you and DW-a-mom are correct, everything in moderation.

Not sure if this is the same study I saw however it likely is and had the same conclusion. My thought when I saw the headline was is this really a surprise or news, people who are poor at social interaction or don't desire it, often clumsy, often have few or no friends and have obsessive intrests are likely to spend excessive time playing video games. Did we really need study this to know this? I laughed when I read that artical, there just stateing the obvious and getting paid to do it.

Well I've been playing since the Atari 2600!

We actually have an issue with my 3 year old - I was letting him play with my old Playstation and he would litterally play it all hours of the day and do nothing else...this is not healthy so I put it away for now.

As for social skills, I have not read the article but for me video games were always social. When I was younger me and my friends would always go to each other's houses to play games, share games, talk about the games all the time...there is definitely a social aspect to the hobby.

Like others have said: all in moderation.

My son plays 11 games of online chess at once. I absolutely hate the adult ads on the site, that's the big problem. But where else is he going to find worthy chess opponents? Hey, when typing this, I talked with my son and we found a way to eliminate the ads - pay a membership fee. Anyway, we are reducing the number of simultaneous games he can play, but chess certainly is worthy of his time.

OK, this study is even sillier - I mean, 10 kids? Really? http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic ... t-dyslexia

It all just seems to underscore the conclusion I think we have generally reached here which is that attentive parents are the best judge of how much screen time each of our kids needs/gets. It does seem to be important to find a balance between games/tv and other types of activities but the specifics of how that balance is achieved is different for every family and every kid. The Am. Academy of Peds can stop trying to make generalized, one-size-fits-all statements about how much time our kids should spend in front of a screen.

I've come across a clinical study with as few 5 kids. If you have a repeated measures study with one dependent variable (i.e. dyslexia) before and after video games then (according to my old SPSS textbook) you only need the sample size for the model to be > than the number of dependent variables. In the study you quoted since the number of DVs is only one therefore you could get away with a sample size as small as 2 kids. Of course it's statistical validity to the general population would be extremely weak.

I think that's the issue. It's also that dyslexia is a large subgroup and I would guess that there is variation in that population. I understand that exploratory studies start out like this, but I'm surprised that anyone reports the results. (Truthfully, my son was involved in an FMRI study that only had about 18 participants, and they also drew conclusions based on that population - but since my son was part of the population, of course their results worked for us!)

Not related to games, but to computers, there are a two articles circulating the internet right now that are very, very interesting to read.

One is by Eustachia Cutler, Temple Grandin's mother: I read it first, and my radar went off when she cited that old 80% divorce-rate number. Still, worth reading in the light of the discussion here, not because I agree with it, but because it offers some talking points on this issue: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2 ... ation.html

The second is a response by Emily Willingham, with which I generally agree with some caveats I'll list below: http://www.forbes.com/sites/emilywillin ... rnography/

The third is an article by John Elder Robison, responding again to the first article: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/my- ... alks-about

To all these articles, I would say this: I am creeped out by the idea that we are connecting autistic people with illegal activity, particularly this kind of illegal activity, which is probably a miniscule part of the population.

That said, the internet and other media devices, while it does work in that forest-for-the-trees sort of a way, is also a social device - but with almost zero social feedback, even less than an interaction where the feedback is hard for an autistic person to pick up.

I can see, for instance, where it might be supremely difficult for a person with a social disability to distinguish between the non-illegal and more hard-core anime sites (which sometimes involve cartoons of children or childlike individuals) and illegal child pornography; the distinction is subtle and requires good Theory of Mind skills.

I can also see where a young adult on the spectrum might easily get him or herself into trouble with unfettered, unsupervised access to the internet and other types of media - in other ways besides this one. It's the same with NT children - there are a lot of freedoms there that they just aren't ready for yet.