A national study of over 1000 subjects of 8- to 18-year olds across the US found that almost all kids play video games, but most of them (91.5%) do not have a serious problem with it. This is a good thing – serious problems should not be extremely common. Nonetheless, this is not a small number of children. There are about 40 million children between 6 and 18 years in the US. If about 9 out of 10 play video games, and about 8.5% of those gamers would be classified as addicted, which means that over 3 million children today are playing in such a way that it is causing serious damage to their lives. These individuals should probably get some help, because we know that addiction can sometimes lead to quite severe issues. In a large study of over 3000 Singaporean children who were followed over 2 years, those children who became addicted also became more depressed, more anxious, more social phobic, and got worse grades than children who also played but did not get addicted. When children stopped being addicted, their depression and anxiety got better.

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Go to source: https://kids.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/frym.2014.00015