Gaming

Many people believe that playing games, whether it be on the television or on the computer, could be harmful to children. I believe that playing video games in general is not harmful to children, but certain games may be. Some computer games contain adult subject matter that young children should not be exposed to at an early age such as sexual material and violence. One thing that has been put in place to protect children from seeing too much violence or sexual subject matter is the video game rating system. There are several different ratings on games these days from E for everyone to M for mature that are based on age. These ratings allow you to see not only what age group the game is recommended for, but give you several reasons why the game is rated the way it is.  Another factor that adds into the game control is the fact that children are not able to purchase games with higher ratings on them, but this however does not stop them from playing them. In the end I believe that parents should be the ultimate monitoring system on their children games. I would personally suggest that parents preview the games themselves before they let their children play them. This way the parents know exactly what their children are being exposed to. You do not have to actually purchase the game to preview it, you could look it up on a website like gamespot.com or by simply typing the title into Google. Playing video games is a part of childhood, and I don’t believe that it is harmful to children when the games that are being played are monitored.

Teenage Drinking

I was trying to come up with a subject to write about and the first thing that came to my mind was something that i faced in high school: teenage drinking. Teenage drinking is something that faces all teenagers across the map. I know that when i was in high school all of the popular kids parties included drinking and if you were at the party you were expected to drink. Whether or not to drink up is a personal choice, I personally chose not to entirely jump on the bandwagon with some of my other friends. Some of my peers in high school choose to drink almost everyday before school and not just at parties. They would fill up pop bottles at home with their parents alcohol and drink it on the way to school or even in their first hour class. I was always concerned for them but me trying to get them to stop seamed to have no effect on their decision. Despite me trying to no avail, there are several things that can be done to prevent teenage drinking. One of the most important things in the fight against teenage drinking isn't the teenagers friends but in fact the teens parents. Parents in this day in age either choose to think that it simply is not occurring in their homes or are in fact completely ignorant to the fact that their teen might be picking up a bottle. If parents were more informed about the harmful effects of teenage drinking or of the signs to look out for then there would be a significant decrease in teenage drinking. When parents do realize that their teen could in fact be drinking without their knowledge underage drinking will at that point become a real problem to them and they will almost certainly do something about it. Schools and cities would be helpful in making parents aware of the problem if they ran campaigns about teenage drinking. They could have meetings at a town recreation center or at the local school. Parents need to wake up and something needs to be done about teenage drinking.