Youth are the worst Internet addicts

• Source: Global Times
• [08:31 July 29 2010]
• Comments

A young man plays an online game Wednesday at an Internet cafe on Xiangyang Road in Xuhui district. Photo: Cai Xianmin

By Liu Dong

A new study fuels growing concerns that Shanghai youth, particularly middle school students, are among the most vulnerable age group in the country when it comes to Internet addiction.

The report conducted by Shanghai Psychology Counseling Center, the largest psychology counseling center on the Chinese mainland, had more than 12,000 students from primary school to high school participate over the past five years.

In 2005, some 2.23 percent of students were classified as addicted to the Internet, compared with a slight increase of 2.6 percent last year. Though the rise is small, the upwards trend is significant, said the researchers of the study.

According to Jiang Wenqing, one of the researchers, and a doctor at Shanghai Psychology Counseling Center, middle school students are the most susceptible to Internet addiction due to several reasons. One contributing factor is that their homework loads are lighter than high school students, but the main cause is that these students, in their early adolescent years, are at an age where they prefer to communicate with their peers rather than their parents.

"Middle school students often find it easier to talk to their friends about their problems," Jiang told the Global Times yesterday. "They don't exactly want to confide to their parents about their secrets during this phase of their life, so they turn to the Internet to share or express their creative ideas or emotions."

Meanwhile, Du Yasong, another researcher, and a professor of psychology at Jiao Tong University, said that while some students spend up to 38.5 hours on the Internet per week, addiction is not necessarily best measured by the amount of time spent online.

"If children are able to function normally when they are away from the computer, then their addiction is not really a problem even if they spend lots of times on the Internet," he told the Global Times yesterday. "But when students break into outbursts easily or get angry when they're not on the Internet, then these feelings of withdrawal become something to be concerned about."

Du said that the study also showed that children, who are part of a close-knit family, where parents and kids communicate often, are less likely to spend more time on the computer, and therefore, less likely to become addicted to the Internet. But he said that the bigger problem rests with society, saying that Internet addiction has become more of a social problem than anything else.

"The whole culture of the Internet has taken over," he said. "People are constantly plugged in, reading the latest news, gossip, or taking part in the gossip themselves through social networking sites, or getting too involved in online games, gambling even, and all of this adds up at the end of the day."