Circulars issued by the schools to remind parents of their students that the Children of Fourth of Primary (nine years old) should not see series for over 16 years; Autonomous Counselors of Culture that urge to supervise children’s access to Streaming platforms (asked him from Madrid, Marta Rivera de la Cruz); Twitter messages from primary teachers who calculate that half of their students see violent series; Teacher unions that warn from the increase in violence in recreation; Tamara Falcó, interviewed in the anthill, explaining that a teacher of his school died murdered by a disturbed role player … The squid game has passed in two weeks of being news because of his public success (it is the most seen series in The world in the history of the Netflix platform) to become a public alarm motive. Is the series a poisoned toy that traumatizes children? What leads them to normalize violence?
There is another question that comes before. What is the squid game? Basically: a Korean series of nine episodes, produced in 2021 with Netflix money. Its history tells a survival game in which the contestants are a handful of disengagement, recruited for fun of a mysterious millionaire who pays the tournament. Whoever loses, dies. The photograph is bright and flat colors, such as colored classic film, the characters seem drawn as in a clear line comic and some scenarios remember a scherch chart. For 15 minutes, the squid game is so innocent resembles the boy, by Charles Chaplin, with a disastrous father and a little acharlotted and a smart and sad girl. Da tenderness. But then, without any omen that announce the chaos, the series becomes a mixture between the hunger and parasites games. The final part of parasites, when the machetzos at a slow motion begin. In Spain, it is issued with the recommendation of “Not suitable for spectators of less than 16 years”.
“That’s where the trap of the squid game is, it seems a kind and suddenly becomes something completely different,” explains Begoña Guevara Thief, president of the Confederation of Parent Associations, Cofapa.
“I am an amateur anime [Japanese animation] and it seems to me that the series is something as simple as carrying that world a little caricatured to a series with actors and photography, it is not the most tremendous story that can be found out there”,
Add Mario Gutiérrez, National President of Education of the CSIF official union.
“The problem is not the series but who sees it.”
In the background, the squid game is an episode more in a controversy that is reproduced periodically, half legend and half a stockings: the children who were thrown out by the window after seeing Superman;
The guys who committed suicide after listening to Nirvana Nevermind;
The imitators of Alex in the mechanical orange … has not this happened always?
“There is a border that is that of violence, the cases of those who are reporting consist that there are children who, when they play English hiding place, do not tell the one who has lost ‘you are dead’ but already represent violence”,
Account Marc Masip, a psychologist and expert in addiction to new technologies.
“And it is not a legend, children’s suicides and mental illness cases among children have skyrocketed in these years.”
“It impacts me a lot that children see things like that,” says Canadian researcher Catherine L’Ecuyer, author of talks with my teacher.
Doubts and certainties about education (espasa) before explaining what is happening in a child’s mind who sees content as the squid game.
“All children are born with a threshold of feeling, a sense of what is right and what is wrong, but, if we surround them with violent and frantic environments, that threshold of feeling will rise. Everything will seem slow, life real
It will seem slow, they will lose empathy and begin to depend on external stimuli to feel something. First, they will normalize violence and then, they will be dependent. ”
Any example that illustrates the idea?
“My friends and I saw series for children until we entered adolescence: the Maya bee, the Smurfs … and Gargamel’s character seemed too hard at that time. A preteen today does not want to know anything about the Smurfs.”
L’Ecuyer’s theory is that competition for the audiovisual market has led suppliers to debug the drug more and more until they take their consumers to the limit.
“Children end up in a state that oscillates between apathy and anxiety, the child loses the desire to do things by himself and hooks himself at the external stimulus, he needs periodic dopamine chutes and every time he looks for them in more erase sources.
There are studies that say that the current cartoons have an average of 7.5 changes of framing per minute. And, if that were not enough, there is the trick of reproduction at speed x1.5 to go faster. ”
That said, the fault of the state of anxiety / depression of our children is from the audiovisual industry.
But focusing on the problem is like going to fight against windmills.
“The responsibility, in the end, is always in families, before, we saw the TV in the living room and the parents passed by, knew more or less what we were seeing, of course they transgressed, that, if a movie
They put two rhombuses, there was an incentive to see it. But we were aware of the transgression and that was already important, “he recalls Guevara’s thief.
“The regulatory codes exist. They are marked in European regulations and platforms offer filters to parents, although sometimes they are complex. But the problem is not from producers, but from the educational community as a whole. The schools have to
Betting on training for children and families, “explains Mari Carmen Morillas, president of the FAPA FAPA Giner Associations Federation of Los Ríos.
“And you have to be attentive to the recrements and dining rooms, which are also educational spaces and that is where almost all conflicts are given. In recreation there is a coexistence must be taught.”
Which child wants teachers to direct their recreals?
“It’s not a matter of directing them, it’s a matter of taking advantage of them, the other day, I saw a girl who came crying because she had not stopped playing football with children. It’s normal, the conflict is going to be given always and is part of learning
. What you have to do is work with that conflict. ”
And that includes children who play squid game and tend to brutality.
“Violence existed before the squid game, do not have to dramatize with this case, the problem really is the access, the problem really is in the children that, from first of that, they reach us very much
Tired because they’ve been all night with the tablet, “Ends Mario Gutiérrez, from the CSIF.