Journal: What is dangerous and what is not

To believe that hundred of young people commit suicide every year because of playing video games too much is to blame computers for a social problem, and this is, from parents´s part, not to assume the responsibility for the young.
300 teenagers have committed suicide in Northen Ireland by the year 2005. And their deaths were blame on the possibility that the kids were under stress because of spending too much time in front of computers. Some of the cases are really important to highlinght, because police discovered several chatrooms in which suicides are promoted and in which visitors are challenged to commit it and to be part and agree with death pacts.
But what is really going on is that the exposure of the teenagers to the internet is not controlled at all by parents as well as regulations on web pages are not as accurate as required. Due to this, kids have access to lot of imformation and to people that they parents do not even know about.
By the other hand, the possibility that the kids end up in a suicide does not depend on what he or she reads on the internet or with whom he or she chats, but on the emotional status of the kids. The situation can be dangerous if a kid has developed a suicidal tendency and this one is emphasized by external factors, like the internet and what comes with it.
Playing violent video games and being part of suicidal chatrooms are some of the many factors that can have a bad influence on kids. But to put emphais on them as cause of the high rate of teenagers suicides is not to focus on the real causes of this problem.
Parents and schools should pay attention to the signs that a kid who is emotionally sad or depressed may show, such as low marks and low academic development, feelings of isolation and lack of interest in social activities, drugs and alcohol abuse, etc. And then, the roots of these signs should be treated as well, which in most of the cases are related to the fact that the teenager belongs to a poor family, a single mother family or a divorced parents family, or a family in which one member suffers from alcoholism. Sometimes teenagers are depressed because they are treated with violence at home, they suffer sexual and pshycological abuses or they are bullied at school.
It seems to be eassier to believe that kids are in risk because of computers and internet instead of realizing that what really leaves a teenager to suicide is a complex pshycological satus, which is directly influenced by the complete enviorment in which he or she lives. Parents should think about how poor can be the relationship between them and their children and how poor can sometimes be the involvement of them on their kids´life. This is what is needed to be change and not the frecuency and way in which teenagers chat and play video games.