Anti-addiction education is crucial

Children experience an interactive art installation on cyber security in Beijing. Photo by Xinhua News Agency reporter Zhang Yuwei

Under the wave of mobile Internet, the breadth and depth of minors' "access to the Internet" have been continuously improved. According to the Fifth National Survey on Internet Use by Minors, online entertainment activities represented by playing games and watching short videos have become an important way for minors to relax and relax, with 67.8% of underage Internet users playing games online and 54.1% watching short videos online.

While the number of young netizens is growing, problems such as Internet addiction continue to attract social attention. It has become a major issue in today's society to analyze the underlying causes of addiction and provide targeted educational countermeasures to bring children back to reality from their excessive addiction to mobile phones and games.

Find the problem "under the iceberg".

Walking into the Tencent Camp for the Protection of Minors (hereinafter referred to as the "Camp") in Chengdu, Sichuan, the phone rings one after another. A national service hotline has been set up in the camp to carry out comprehensive network protection and services for games, social networking, payment and other products used by minors.

The customer service at the camp once received such a call - a parent from Henan Province said that a 15-year-old child spent more than 20,000 yuan in the game in one year. The parent hit the child after finding out and contacted customer service to apply for a refund.

In the past few years, with the implementation of the new anti-addiction regulations for online games, all parties have made concerted efforts to prevent addiction in games, but there are still cases of minors fraudulently using their parents' information to bypass the anti-addiction system. According to the relevant data of the camp, 98% of the cases involving games it accepts are minors who use adult accounts fraudulently.

Although there are many similar cases, the parent's confession still caught the attention of Ma Ying, an expert in camp education.

"We found that after the child recharged the game, the amount of gifts given to others was high, which is relatively rare in the consumption behavior of minors. Ma Ying said.

After communication with parents and follow-up investigations, Ma Ying and her colleagues found that the child was not simply addicted to games, but was bullied on campus, and gave many game props to his senior classmates.

Behind the problem of Internet addiction, there are complex reasons such as the psychological condition of minors, the status of their original families, the use of terminal products, and the quality of related content production, and there are also differences in performance between urban and rural areas.

"Some urban children are under great pressure to study and are prone to frustration, but games give them a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction, and many left-behind children in rural areas lack guardianship and companionship, and playing games and swiping their mobile phones have become a form of entertainment and socialization. Zhang Tingting, the camp customer service, said.

In Ma Ying's view, minors' addiction to games and the Internet is only a spatial manifestation, and it is necessary to find the problem "under the iceberg". To this end, the camp has set up an "education counseling group" to provide one-on-one education assistance services for families in need, on the one hand, to guide parents to find problems, "sit down and chat" with their children, and on the other hand, to guide children to establish correct network awareness and help them improve their network literacy and network security awareness.

Improve the online literacy of minors

In 2019, Wu Ping, who graduated from university, went to the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps to teach. In her years of volunteer teaching life, she has helped many students who are addicted to mobile phones and games.

"There was a little boy in the third grade who didn't go back to the dormitory every night and kept saying that he wanted to go home to see his mother. But I heard other classmates 'snitching' that the boy often played on his mobile phone at home. Wu Ping said.

Wu Ping was worried that the students would encounter problems on the Internet, so she called the camp's customer service. After learning about the child's situation, the experts of the counseling team raised a possibility: the child is so dependent on the mother, has there been a change in the family?

"Before that, I always thought that there was something wrong with the way children socialize or the way parents educate. Later, he found out that the child's parents had remarried, and he was worried that his mother would follow his stepfather and no longer want him, so he had a huge sense of crisis, which brought about a series of problems. This experience made Wu Ping think more. After the volunteer teaching, she came to the camp and became a member of the education and counseling team, continuing the work of helping minors.

In order to improve children's Internet literacy, Wu Ping and her colleagues have developed the "Internet Literacy Seven-Day Course", which focuses on three aspects: reshaping cognition, psychological empowerment, and behavior formation, to help children regulate their emotions, build confidence, form habits, and gradually change the way minors use the Internet in play and learning. In addition, the camp also carried out the "Youth Lighthouse" rural campus tour to unite social forces and resources to improve the Internet literacy of left-behind children.

All forces should move in the same direction

According to the 5th National Survey on Internet Use by Minors, compared with 2021, the Internet literacy of minors in China continues to improve, and nearly ninety percent of underage Internet users often use the Internet for learning. With the phased results of the anti-addiction work of minors in the game industry, the problem of excessive gaming by minors has been effectively improved, and more than sixty percent of underage netizens believe that the current management method of restricting the time of gaming allows them or their classmates to play games significantly.

Experts and industry insiders said that enterprises, families, society and other forces should continue to work together in the same direction, comprehensive measures, and work together to prevent addiction and healthy Internet use for minors.

According to Tencent's financial report for the first quarter of 2023, minors accounted for only 0.4% and 0.7% of Tencent's total game time and turnover, down 96% and 90% from the same period in 2020. Li Jing, the person in charge of the camp, said that since its establishment seven years ago, the camp has provided more than 36 million users with knowledge and advice on healthy Internet use and addiction prevention for minors, with a total of 87,000 parents in in-depth communication and counseling, and 190,000 volunteers to participate in it.

Deng Xueliang, a special researcher at the China Youth Research Center and vice chairman of the Family Education Branch of the Sichuan Provincial Education Society, said that the family is the first school, parents are the first teachers, and the first person responsible for the protection of minors is also the family. Parents need to improve their awareness of healthy Internet use and anti-addiction, better accompany and guide their children, and improve their and their children's ability to use Internet tools scientifically and effectively to acquire knowledge.

Guo Yuanyuan, deputy dean of the Institute of Megacity Economic and Social Development of the Capital University of Economics and Business, pointed out that minors are a new generation of "digital natives", and the ways of "accessing the Internet" are diversified and differentiated. In order to prevent minors from being addicted to games and the Internet, games should be appropriate for an appropriate age, protection and guidance should be treated simultaneously, and online gatekeeping should be precise and data-based, so as to realize the governance of people and machines, and the co-governance of coordination.

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Source: People's Daily Overseas Edition