How to Raise a Healthy Gamer: Break Bad Screen Habits, End Power Struggles, and Transform Your Relationship with Your Kids

the thoughts in our mind can come from two places: our sensory organs and the memory of our sensory organs.

When a child is told day after day that they are worthless, they start to internalize those thoughts. That’s also learning, but it certainly isn’t healthy or productive.

It’s not just the gaming you have to restrict; the more you can shut down or slow down the massive amounts of sensory input they get from gaming—Twitch, YouTube, whatever, it’s all the same—the more progress you can make.

When video games are used for enjoyment, not escape, that makes a healthy gamer. Using games to encourage social connection, not enable isolation—that makes a healthy gamer. Using video games to replace social support, or to shore up faltering self-confidence—that leads to unhealthy gamers.

If you want your child to be independent, you can’t do all the work for them. You have to let them do the growing;

Dopamine governs all three of these responses—pleasure, reinforcement, and anticipation—all of which evolved to help us survive.

The harder something is, the more we feel challenged, the more dopamine gets released when we succeed.

game designers titrate the difficulty to optimize dopamine release—thus reinforcing the behavior, and maximally increasing anticipation.

our brain can start to develop tolerance for particular things. The first cookie you eat is very tasty; the second one is pretty good, too. But after you’ve polished off three or four more cookies, you probably can barely even taste them, let alone enjoy them.

the problem is that if we stop playing video games and read a book, we’ll get a “normal” amount of dopamine signal, but with our downregulated receptors, the total “volume” is too low—thus making reading feel not at all fun.

They keep playing so they don’t have to think about all that negative stuff.

once your child has started outsourcing the regulation of their emotions to video games, their capacity to deal with negative emotions without gaming shrinks.

No one gets distracted playing video games—game designers take care of the focusing part for you.

Gamers lose the ability to control their mind, to force it to focus.

People who game too much essentially put the development of their maturity on hold.

gamers have a hard time learning from their mistakes.

Gamers aren’t learning from their mistakes, because whatever that failure was—small or large—they aren’t feeling the pain of it.

Video games allow kids to be who they wish they were, to assume an identity of their own choosing, one that hasn’t been assigned to them at birth.

Who wants to be a B student in real life if they can be number one on the leaderboard in their online universe?

Psychologists coined the term intent to mastery, to indicate that a human is driven to exert a massive amount of effort to achieve something difficult and valuable; this is a pattern that is hardwired into our circuitry. The intent to mastery is the core reason that infants don’t give up when learning to walk.