GregHowley.com

I spoke in my first Mungcast about the Children and Media Research and Advancement Act and why I thought it was a bad idea. Well, just this week, Senate passed the damned thing. Freaking Lieberman. Freaking Hillary Clinton. Those two make me ashamed to have been a resident of Connecticut and New York.

This act will have the CDC performing a study on the effects of media on children. Personally, I believe that this study is going to be biased from the start, and that those conducting it have already come to a conclusion, and are simply going to conduct "research" to justify their foregone conclusion.

The only hopeful phrase in the article is the following:

According to a press release issued by Senator Santorum, "The CDC will then issue grants based on these priorities to researchers to examine the impact of media on children and adolescents' ability to learn and their social, emotional, physical, and behavioral development."

If they're checking on the impact video games has on childrens' ability to learn, they're likely to find that the games improve concentration and sharpen young minds, as I've often heard. I'm just worried about the rest: social (I'll bet they're testing single-player games) emotional (can only go horribly wrong in this kind of study) physical (They're not testing DDR or Wii games, so how can sitting in a chair have any physical benefit?) and behavioral (unlikely to go well).

If this goes how I feel it will, it will inevitably lead to government regulation over video game ratings, and underaged gaming will become like underaged drinking. Why can't we just decide that parents should make these decisions for their children? Personally, I'd rather parent my own child rather than have the government do it.