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

the problem is that oftentimes the ahamkara will be incorrect. Any time the ahamkara is activated, it can conflict with our buddhi, or intellect.

If they really are ruining their life, they know it, but their mind is trying very hard to ignore that. The more on target you are, the stronger the negative emotion, which results in a dragon-fire-level response (even if they agree with you!). You will have activated their ahamkara and they’ll immediately flip into denial mode.

Resistance is triggered at its root by negative emotion. When the ahamkara is active, it controls everything else, and your child will argue until they’re blue in the face, denying that they have a problem.

We need to stay in control, but they need to feel some agency—some control over their lives—as well.

If you don’t appreciate that psychological issue, you won’t have their buy-in; they won’t listen, and they’ll resist.

With a pre-insight child, their buddhi does not understand that there is a problem—so they argue. With post-insight kids, their buddhi has been hijacked by their ahamkara—so they will still argue, but out of denial of the truth, rather than ignorance.

We’ll use any and all rationalizations to protect ourselves from an uncomfortable truth, because if we accept the problem as true, it makes us feel hopeless, which is a deeper psychological problem. So—as the logic goes—denial is protective.

If you are open, curious, listening, and not attacking them, they no longer need protection, and their ahamkara will deactivate.

Fault and boundaries are independent of each other.

Instead of bickering over blame, you should acknowledge the failure, skip assigning blame (you can even concede that it isn’t their fault), and yet confirm that you’re still not moving the boundary.

really hard position to take with your child, but it’s vital. Just because it isn’t their fault doesn’t mean that you should compromise the boundaries you are trying to set.

What if they have a really good reason, and you decide to compromise the boundary? Then what are you reinforcing? You’re reinforcing that, for the right reason, the boundary can change. Then the game for your child becomes how to find the best reasons to convince you to violate the boundary again.

Going forward, are you going to be right at the edge of missing an agreed-upon goal again? If it happens again, what do you expect me to do? Are you expecting that if you can come up with a good enough reason, the rules don’t apply anymore?

when we’re worried about our children, most of us talk a lot more than we listen. We tend to ask questions with the goal of proving a point. But what if we were to shift to asking questions with a goal of understanding instead?

“I can’t always trust your promises—that’s why we’re here in the first place. You already promised to do the work. And you didn’t follow through. That doesn’t seem to be working.”

“I understand that you don’t see a problem. I’m not trying to convince you that there is a problem. But my job as your parent is to set you up for success as an adult, and I don’t see what you’re doing as moving in that direction. I know that you don’t understand it—I wish I could explain it better to you. But I have to ultimately do my job as your parent. I can’t let you down just because you don’t understand what I’m doing here.”

if you cave, what you will be reinforcing is that escalation on their part gets them what they want. If escalation prompts you to cave on the boundary, you are training them to escalate.

“I get that you miss out on your gaming, but the problem is that you haven’t done your homework. Every time we talk about it, you list the reasons that you aren’t getting good grades. I understand that sometimes life gets in the way, but, at the end of the day, the grades that you’re getting are kind of unacceptable.”

If a particular strategy has been working, and you have made good progress, don’t stop what you’re doing now! That strategy is exactly the one you need to maintain.

I have worked with a large population of eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds through my Healthy Gamer platform, and they often say that they wished their parents had been stricter with them so that their gaming did not get out of control.