Violent Video Games or Just Bad Parenting?

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Hold on, I know that title sounds awfully harsh. But yes, sometimes parents can make bad decisions. It's hard to admit to it, which is why parents often blame external things for their childrens behavior. In the article "This is Your Child's Brain On Video Games" Victoria Dunckley provides a story about a child named Aiden who is playing video games. She explains that playing video games causes your heart rate to rise, and your fight or flight response in engaged. Aiden eventually has a tantrum, lashing out at his little sister and parents. The other half of the article is her explaining the brain and what exactly happens when you play video games, our natural behavioral responses to stress and stimuli. But do you know what else causes these same reactions? Movies. Tv. Music. Are we just going to remove all of those from our children too? How are video games any different? They're just another way to blame parenting decisions on something else. Instead, I look at the story as two parents who have a nine year old boy spending to much time on one thing, that yes, provides a lot of stimuli. The problem isn't getting rid of the item that provides to much stimuli, but managing it, and making sure the child understand how to deal with their emotions properly in the first place.

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Comparing Dunckley's article to Tom Lowery's "10 Ways Gaming Can Help or Harm Your Brain", it takes a more balanced view. Lowery says "it's about balance." Too much of anything can be harmful. So while Dunckley does provide a very emotional argument to video games, illustrating a convincing story with no real critical thinking, I appreciate how Lowery isn't unbalanced. Lowery even gives another list at the end of the article ways to balance a child's video game intake, which I appreciated, as he didn't say something extreme like "just throw out all the video games! Their evil!" Like so many parents think would help. But instead lists ways to help the child become balanced. Limit their time on the game, make sure they have other activities to do besides just video games. The one issue I have with his piece is one of his harmful affect video games have, is depression and anxiety. He says that "In particular, kids who've become addicted often exhibit social phobias." Now when some read this, they think video games add to depression and anxiety. When I find this misleading, and it sounds more like, yet again, an underlying issue rather than video games fault. You can say the same thing about food, that people who overeat often suffer from mental illness, as overeating can be a bad coping mechanism. Same with video games, same with any other form of entertainment. The problem isn't the entertainment, it's the underlying issue of being depressed or anxious.
Now the last article I looked at, "The Impact of Degree of Exposure to Violent Video Games, Family Background, and Other Factors on Youth Violence" by Whitney DeCamp and by Christopher J. Ferguson. In this article they say that the studies around video games and their link to violence, at most can be linked by people with predisposed mental illness can be effected by violent video games to make them more aggressive. But in this article they go over multiple other studies and researches and say that the studies are either flawed in some way, (not having a big subject pool, leaving key elements out, etc) or didn't prove any real link between violent behaviors and violent video games. In this piece, they mention The Catalyst Model, which says that violent behaviors are more strongly linked to genetic predisposition, harsh environments, and emotional distance from caretakers.
Now later in the article they made their own study, with children who play violent video games and ones who don't, and their propensity to get into fights. In the survey, the male and female 8th grade children who play violent video games were more likely to hit a peer, and only the females who played violent video games were more likely to get into group fights. There is also a bit of correlation with male violence they measured from 8th graders to 11th graders, but the article says that the effect is quite weak. And for any of the studies for 11th grade students showed no real correlation. The article does say that "(one of the results, with children interested in violent media as a whole indicates) that the propensity toward violent media is a far stronger predictor than actual violent game play." At the end of 8 models, 5 of them showed no correlation between violent video games and violent behaviors, and only 2 with any positive correlation.
Looking at this, I can take that there is some correlation between children who are already troubled and an interest in video games, but not that video games were the main cause of their violence, but instead it was can be caused by multiple other factors, like bad parenting.
So all I ask, is that when you see a article talking about the dangers of ______! Is it really the outside sources fault? Or can we have a more critical eye, look at the things we do in a balanced way, and learn that everything is good in moderation.