It’s official: games aren’t bad for kids. This is what researchers at Scotland’s University of Glasgow concluded after running a ten-year-long study that involved over 13,000 families, as reported by the Gamesandlearning.org website.

The study surveyed mothers of small children to see if they could establish a link between the amount of time kids spend in front of a screen, either playing games or watching television, and behavioural and emotional problems in later life.

Games were suspected of having an even more pronounced effect on children than TV, given the “active user engagement, identification with characters and repeated rehearsal and reinforcement” involved in their consumption, but the study concluded that “exposure to video games had no effect on behaviour, attention or emotional issues”.

Interestingly, the study also concluded that watching TV for three hours or more at age five led to a “small increase in behavioural problems” in kids aged between five and seven, however overall neither TV nor videogames could be held responsible for attentional or emotional issues.

With over 13,000 families involved in the study, and the long period over which it was conducted, the researchers are confident their data are solid and their conclusions accurate.

So there you have it, videogames aren’t bad for kids. Obviously, parents should still exercise discretion and ensure their kids are playing appropriate games for their age, because there’s still no substitution for actual parenting.