All-Spy Blog » addiction http://www.all-spy.com/blog Monitoring Solutions Thu, 08 Apr 2010 11:49:17 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 What many of these kids need is their parents… http://www.all-spy.com/blog/2008/11/26/what-many-of-these-kids-need-is-their-parents%e2%80%a6/ http://www.all-spy.com/blog/2008/11/26/what-many-of-these-kids-need-is-their-parents%e2%80%a6/#comments Wed, 26 Nov 2008 09:17:24 +0000 All-Spy http://www.all-spy.com/blog/?p=84 This is what the specialists are saying about kids with gaming problems. `..more we work with these kids, less I believe we can call this addiction. What many of these kids need is their parents and their school teachers – this is a social problem.` So says Keith Bakker the founder and head of Europe’s first and only clinic to treat gaming addicts.

Parents and teachers to blame
For Mr Bakker the root cause of the huge growth in excessive gaming lies with parents who have failed in their duty of care. 87% of online gamers are over the age of 18. From that age, help is something they need to seek for themselves, because as you know parents no longer have the legal right to intervene.

For those who are younger, intervention may be the only solution. That means even sometimes literally taking a child away from a computer, removing them from the game for a period of time until they begin to see there are other choices. If parents aren`t there for them, they are more likely to isolate themselves in virtual worlds.

“This gaming problem is a result of the society we live in today,” Mr Bakker told BBC News. “Eighty per cent of the young people we see have been bullied at school and feel isolated. Many of the symptoms they have can be solved by going back to good old fashioned communication.”

At least 10 hours a day playing
George [not his real name] is an 18-year-old gamer being treated at the Keith Bakker`s clinic in Amsterdam. He was spending at least 10 hours a day playing Call of Duty 4 until he sought help at the centre.
“Call of Duty was somewhere I felt accepted for the first time in my life,” he says. “I was never helped by my parents or my school. At the clinic I also feel accepted and have come out of myself.”
Read more about George`s case, here.

More posts about this issue in blogoshere.

]]> http://www.all-spy.com/blog/2008/11/26/what-many-of-these-kids-need-is-their-parents%e2%80%a6/feed/ 4 `Couples need to work on spending more time with each other instead of their monitors` http://www.all-spy.com/blog/2008/10/21/couples-need-to-work-on-spending-more-time-with-each-other-instead-of-their-monitors/ http://www.all-spy.com/blog/2008/10/21/couples-need-to-work-on-spending-more-time-with-each-other-instead-of-their-monitors/#comments Tue, 21 Oct 2008 08:07:31 +0000 All-Spy http://www.all-spy.com/blog/?p=77 This is one of the statements psychiatrist Arlene Kalman made on the latest Wellgate for Women press release. According to a survey conducted by Harris Interactive for Wellgate for Women, ninety-six percent of women who work in an office claim to like or love their computer, with the average woman spending nearly triple the amount of time daily with her computer than she spends with her significant other (9.3 hours compared to 3.6 hours).
(You can read the press release here :) )

What we find interesting is that when it comes to our closest friends, usually the woman is the one who blames the husband for spending more time with the computer…not mentioning the time spent at the computer during working hours.
So, starting from this topic we conducted an internal survey at our offices. This is what we found out :)

100% claimed that men spend more time at the computer at home. Two thirds claimed that women are more addicted to specific topics (tabloids, shopping, music, etc) then men. All agreed that a woman can stay longer without a computer.
We conducted this instant survey in all offices from the building and we asked simple questions like `At home, who spends more time at the computer, you or your husband/wife?`, `Which one of you is more addicted?` and other polemics which can`t be reproduced here :)

In the end, what is the truth? Do women spend more time on the computer instead of their families? Or the men are `the main subject` in this issue?

What do you say? How is it at your home/close friends?

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