Video Game Violence Observation

Imagine growing up in an environment where everything is a fight. When you place a tooth brush in the wrong space or you drink a bottle of water in the refrigerator, you are yelled at. Imagine if everything you did caused a larger fight between your parents and told that you were the reason for their fights. This is what it was like growing up in my household. On September 19th, 2015, I turned 18 years old and FaceTimed my brothers and observed the way they interacted with me while a video game was being played. Through my observations I discovered that children have a difficult time in both holding a conversation and controlling behaviors when a video game is present. However, I took my family’s background into consideration and realized that

During this interaction period I was trying to hold a conversation with both boys. In the background there was a video game being played which gained the majority of their attention. Both boys were screaming at each other because someone killed the other when they were not paying attention. This behavior continued and progressed to the next level. Kyle took the controller away from Owen because he started to cry. Once Kyle did this, Owen got up and started to hit Kyle repeatedly while screaming at him. Kyle became so annoyed at his behavior that he ended up throwing the controller on to the ground resulting in a broken controller. These behaviors were conducted as if I was not even

E. Mark Cummings and Patrick T. Davies are two of those psychologists who have explained the effects of this discord on childhood development. In their findings they explain the immense amount of evidence that children often become distressed or show hostile and aggressive behaviors towards siblings when there has been marital discord in the household ( Cummings & Davies,1994;Cummings et al., 2006). This aggressive behavior that Cummings and Davies explains is parallel to the behavior that Owen showed when Kyle took the controller away from him and the behavior that Kyle reacted back with. It is highly possible that Kyle and Owen observed this aggressive behavior when their parents were fighting when they were younger. Marital discord is also said to contribute to child and adolescent adjustment problems such as conduct disorders (Davies & Cummings, 1998; Parke & Buriel, 2006). The ways in which both boys handled themselves can be seen as a conduct disorder. Instead of talking the problems out, the problem quickly escalated to physical violence. In our childhood, our parents constantly fought and would blame their fallouts on us kids. This environment was not healthy for us to be in, in fact it is known that “conflict ridden homes are not healthy contexts for child or adolescent development” (Booth & Amato, 2001;Hetherington Bridges &