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

you are the boss! They’re young enough that you still provide a lot of structure for their day—you set their bedtime, you make their meals, and you likely organize their social lives. Therefore, you can and still should set firm limits on video gaming—how much time they can spend at it, where they must sit when gaming, and what games they are allowed to play.

The biggest problem is that they think they know everything, but they don’t. They don’t know what they don’t know yet. Their brains are still very much a work in progress and vulnerable to the pull of gaming. They are not yet able to understand that gaming could become problematic for them (it’s still just fun!) or that it may already be problematic. They are still in the pre-insight stage of their young lives.

teenagers will rebel against anything that you unilaterally impose on them. At this point, you have to start working with them, rather than against them.

saying okay to the plan was a different thing from being able to carry it out

Dave was not meeting Sean where he was at cognitively. Sean was willing to agree with his father’s demands, but he wasn’t cognitively ready to admit he had a big problem, so he kept falling short in his efforts.

Until the two, father and son, came to see the problem from the same side, until they became a team, they would never be able to overcome Sean’s attraction to gaming.

You can develop a whole elaborate plan, with steps from A to Z, but if you’re pulling your child toward you instead of meeting them where they’re at, it’s never going to work.

your goal should be to ask open-ended questions to get them to nonjudgmentally view their own behavior and get them thinking. If you are judgmental, it will activate their defense mechanisms. So, instead, invite them to think through the behavior—both the pros and cons.

Rhetorical questions are used to make a point, not elicit information.

They acknowledge that gaming causes some problems, but it isn’t worth the effort to fix them.

A lot of parents (like Dave) misread ambivalence for change readiness, and then make a common mistake: They pounce! The second their child says something like “I guess this could be a problem,” they jump into fix-it mode: Good. Then let’s stop playing.

The right move to make when your child is contemplative is to use reflective listening to send their beliefs right back at them. When you say something like this, your child won’t automatically clamp down and resist, because you’re not pushing against them. There’s nothing to push back on!

if I jump in and give them the solution I want them to try, it is scientifically less likely to work.

the worst thing that you can do for a person is anything that they can do for themselves.

By taking care of all of their needs, beyond allowing them to remain a child from a helplessness perspective, you are also enabling their gaming problem. If you do their laundry, cook their food, clean up after them, and perhaps allow them to live rent-free in your home, so they don’t even need to hold down a job, you are creating an unstructured, wide-open, fertile environment for them to fill with as much gaming as they want.

Little by little, you want them to start fulfilling their adult responsibilities themselves.

“Success” isn’t the destination we are aiming for here; it is an ongoing process. The most important thing to remember is that you and your child are in this together. You are a team, and you’ll have the most success if you manage to stick together.

The world is a dangerous place. But good parenting is not about preventing your child from experiencing it.

All you can do is teach them how to be good human beings, to teach them to be concerned about who they hang out with. And if you can do that, you’re going to create an exceptional kid.

If you can learn to sit, listen, and talk to your child, then, ideally, they will come to you with their negative feelings, instead of venting or avoiding those feelings through gaming.