What do you do if your teenage daughter is addicted to videogames and Internet porn?
For one South Korea family, the answer is to enroll your daughter in a horse riding therapy program.
And by all accounts, it did the trick.
Horse Therapy
I guess that’s one way to sublimate your daughter’s budding sexual desires. Reports Reuters:
Four months ago, the parents of a teenage South Korean girl were at their wits' end over her addiction to surfing the Internet for pornography.
Kim's parents tried art, music therapy and persistent nagging to try and stem their daughter's addiction.
When none of these worked, her school suggested the Riding Healing Center, a therapy organisation that uses horse-riding to cure emotional and behavioral disorders, which it believes are an underlying cause of internet addiction.
And the equine therapy worked! Kim used to send seven hours or more on her computer, but now her mother says she “barely goes on the Internet,” and when she does, “she makes a promise to me first about how long she will play on the computer.”
Fun With A Living Thing
Yoosook Joung, a Doctor of child psychiatry at Samsung Medical Centre, explained to Sky News the horse riding worked not just because it is "a very fun" physical activity, but also incorporates "a living thing" which ends up forging an "emotional connection" that can "help overcome Internet addiction."
It is unclear if giving dogs and cats to those suffering from Internet addiction, which Korean government data estimates affects 680,000 children (or 10% of the total population under 19), would work as well as horses.
Besides this horse therapy program, which plans on building 30 additional facilities by 2022 to meet "rising demand," South Koreans have used anti-depressants as treatment for Starcraft 2 videogame addicts, and specifically for minors, instated a "Shutdown Law" that prevents anyone under the age of 16 from playing on the Internet past midnight.
This Shutdown Law, however, is easily circumvented by teens like Kim who admitted to playing on the Internet all night long whenever her parents were away by using their accounts instead of hers.
Internet Addiction Is A Worldwide Problem
South Korea isn't the only Asian nation restricting minors' use of the Internet; Thailand banned the use of cyber cafes for minors from 10pm to 2pm in 2006, and the Philippines did something similar way back in 1999.
The popularity of cyber cafes has waned given the accessibility of personal computers and smartphones, but the appeal of the Internet has not.
Internet addiction is a buzzword in the United States as well, but a simpler solution - compared to giving everyone horses, anti-depressants or banning Internet usage at certain times for minors - would be education about the effects of being on the Internet for, say, seven or more hours a day.
Basically, the idea is that there is more to life than the Internet (gasp). Dancing therapy, for instance, is successfully combating Internet addiction in teen males in China.