Do you have rules about how much time your kids can spend playing video games?

I don't have children (unless you count the small demon that I walk outdoors twice a day and enjoys chicken far too often) but I was watching some clips of Limmy, the comedian-turned-streamer, in which he discusses Fortnite and his son's addiction to the game. Limmy has a 10 year old child, and in his signature heavy Scottish accent he describes how the game makes his son rage, makes him angry and upset and gets him worked up, to the extent that Limmy says he considers it irresponsible parenting for him to allow his child to continue playing that game. Here's the clip, featuring the angry child, for anyone interested:

It's titled "Fortnite is poison" but I feel this mindset could apply to any number of these addictive multiplayer games. I grew up playing Age Of Empires 2 and Call Of Duty United Offensive online, until I graduated into World Of Warcraft, and while part of me thinks "kids get invested in games in a way that the older generation don't understand because they can't relate to a child's lack of agency or social mobility which games grant them" and "parents will always be concerned when an outside influence is provoking a reaction from their child which they consider extreme" the other part of me knows that this generation of games is far more manipulative and socially insidious.

I've been using this site for 10+ years and I know a lot of you have too, and as many of my friends and colleagues are now parents I'm going to assume you've all collectively accumulated a bunch of kids as well. Do you have concerns around letting the youths play videogames? Have you put rules in place? I feel like my own access was unlimited and unfiltered - my parents were happy that I wasn't outside causing trouble and the scene was relatively tame with limited online options - there was only so much harm that could be done. These days I feel like games are built like casinos and social media has given children (and adults, honestly) unrealistic expectations when it comes to their own abilities, in a way that propagates disappointment, addiction, and bullying. I'm going to assume that if you're reading this you're among the more informed parents when it comes to video games, so I'm interested to know how your parenting styles have adapted to the current generation, if at all.

x

I'm been hemming and hawing about this subject for a lil while now. I have a 7 and 4 year old and want to let my kids play games since my parents let me play games however long I wanted as long as I wasn't flunking school. But, I feel my younger child playing games at 4 because he wants to play games with his brother is not at the age to do so without any limitations. So I ration out the games to every other day and after homework is done, for 30 - 40 minutes.

edit: I also do not put any games on any tablets in the house. I ain't letting my 7 year old into the world of F2P just yet. Wait til he's older when I can give him a talk about that stuff. Gaming can only be done on my Switch or PS4 and they know not to touch Dad's stuff without me being there.

I don't have kids but i do have made a point for my own brain to never get invested in those f2p games where you're mostly managing meters and timers. I've dabbled with those games in the past, and it just puts these mental timers in my head that i want to hit in the name of getting as cheap & efficient through a game. So suddenly this silly game gets a grip on my schedule and i straight up felt a bit bummed out if i missed a timer.

I think it's safe to say if such games have such an effect on me as an adult that tends to be pretty good at not being seduced by the vices of life, it can't be great to have that be part of a kid's game routine.

But then you start to wonder.. hmm.. what about 'big' f2p games with cosmetics and dlc and battlepasses? I can easily enjoy the game for what it is without having to get into the lootboxes and cosmetics myself, but i do feel like a lot of it is because i didn't grow up in a particularly rich family and that has made me very aware of the things i spend my money on. A child wouldn't have those same values by default naturally. But it's probably also an impossible job to keep your kid away from such a popular f2p game where all the friends play it, and it's free naturally. You don't want your kid to be the 'weird' one and not be able to meet up and mingle with the other kids.

It's a conundrum!

I have one son who isn’t yet old enough for gaming and yes I absolutely plan on limiting time and access to games. Games are no different to any other hobby In that it’s a great pastime but doing too much of any one thing can become unhealthy. - games have the added disadvantage that certain subsets like F2P iPhone games are literally designed to be addictive. I have no doubt that my good intentions are easier said than done but if I was able to set up a similar routine that @chamurai describes I’d be pretty proud of myself.

@chamurai: I commented on your reply above but it’s been years since I’ve posted on any forum so forgot to ‘reply’ to you!

As the generation that grew up with consoles, you'd have thought that millennial parents would be the most lax about letting their kids play video games. Ironically the inverse more-often seems true, with enthusiasts having the most rigorous rules around gaming + online time. Which makes sense really; We know. We know how insidious loot boxes are. We know how game design is structured to perpetuate addiction. We've talked about it on forums, in discord channels, on podcasts. We understand the negative mental effects of hanging out in twitch chat all day because we've been there. Done that. Got a wardrobe full of stupid t-shirts.

@sweep: It reminds me of all those Facebook & Google employees protecting their kids from social media and the home assistants.

As someone that grew up nearly unsupervised as a child in the late 80's I do wonder about the inverse strictness that I see in parents my age. Back in my youth it was said that if you watched Nightmare on Elm Street or similar horror films you would grow up to be a psychopath and that watching TV all day would rot your brain. That video games like Doom would make you worship satan. I consumed copious amounts of TV and thanks to a brother nearly 5 years older than me I watched all the most violent movies of those times way younger than anyone would deem appropriate even in the 80's. This doesn't even factor in all the unsupervised hours on the computer playing video games and installing highly questionable mods. The Tomb Raider "crack" that played out a rather graphic animation anytime Lara even touched an animal, of the sexual variety, comes to mind. Yet I'm a fairly regular member of society. If anything seeing all that R rated content so early on really desensitized me to it to the point where I feel like these days people have really strong reactions to certain content whereas I simply shrug my shoulders.

So while our current times have a host of new evils I do wonder if they are worse or just different. Is Twitch the new TV will rot your brain for example? Microtransactions are in fact problematic for younger kids, but as long as you take steps to make sure no credit cards are attached to a console or a phone they shouldn't be a problem - of course maybe easier said than done as I don't operate in those circles? I'm just curious if left unsupervised as I think a lot of people my generation were, would these young kids similarly just grow up at a certain point and be completely fine without the need to track their every move.

I don't have kids but I wouldn't necessarily police the time spent gaming unless it became negatively excessive.

However F2P or any competitive MP game would be totally off limits and likewise phone/tablet gaming, I don't think younger folks have the experience or self control to deal with any sort of grinding/carrot chasing mechanics.

I have two kiddos at home but only one of them is old enough to play video games. He is eight years old. He plays games a lot, but typically only single player games, plus whatever games we play together. I'm pretty lax with regard to play time and content but the catch is that we play a lot of games together or at least he's playing games in the living room where everyone can see what he's up to, and with content that's questionable, we have a lot of convos about media and tropes and morality and game design. I try not to guide my sons choices too much, but I can't really help it. We had some fun a summer or two ago playing Fortnite together as a family (me, my wife, our son, and sometimes my half brother) but I've actually never seen him play it by himself, he doesn't really play games online much at all.

I don't think you would have to have kids to know this, but Fortnite is an entire youth culture in itself, and my 10yo half brother has been swallowed up by it. He spends a crazy amount of time in Fortnite and got in big trouble recently for pilfering my moms credit card and wracked up 500 bucks of charges on Fortnite stuff, and also a digital copy of GTA V. Close to my heart, as I was once a young buck sneaking my cousins copy of GTA SA out the backdoor of a New Years Eve party. I got caught though, as did my half-brother. I wonder where the "raging" thing comes from though because my half-brother has a bunch of smashed up controllers and that is his explanation. I want to call it a learned behavior from streamer/YT/tiktok culture but I think at this point it's deeper than that, and even if it comes from there it's a peer-learned behavior, and kids are really really really good at learning from their peers.

Childhood memory isn't exactly the most reliable thing but I do recall playing video games with no limit or expectation on time or anything. We used to do these surveys in elementary school fairly often where you would answer about how much time you spent watching TV, playing games, etc and I was always so proud to choose whatever the highest option was with game time. My parents were young but ultimately not plugged in so I snuck by with some pretty edgy stuff, although after the Hot Coffee scandal it was hard to get my hands on M rated games sometimes, though their were games that my parents understood as exceptions just by virtue of their importance to me. I always got to play Metal Gear games because of that.

Had I not spent virtually my entire adolescence playing video games and being on the computer I might think differently, but part of my parenting outlook is that I want to give my kiddos plenty of choices to make on their own, I just try to be ahead of the curve and talk to them a lot about what's going on and what they're seeing so they can have some chance at contextualization. I know that by the time a kid is 12 or 13 the doors get blown off anyway whether I want that or not, so I figure that I just want to give them the tools that I can to understand and dissect the world they're in, and the media in it. Maybe I could call it contextual desensitization, or something like that. I hope that someday they can use art and media and understand those things in their own ideology, and within separate ideologies and frameworks, and if I break up enough of that stuff, it will make them less vulnerable to media becoming their ideology, or heavily tainting it.

Some games are still basically off-limits. GTA for example, I don't really let my boy play. A few times together we've played and stole cars and got in chases and done crazy flips and caused chaos in GTA V, III, SA, or VC, or Chinatown Wars---and we do that because I think those games are fun, and I want to emphasize what exactly makes those games fun and how they ride the line--but games like that we only play rarely, and only together. My son was really into playing Just Cause 3 but I took issue with him blowing up NPCs all the time, which isn't really that big of a deal because the entire point of the game is to cause explosive mayhem---but I think creating a loose boundary like "how about we delete this game for a few months" is the equivalent to redirecting their attention and creating a boundary while stopping short of creating a forbidden and therefore must-have item, because I don't want to cord it off entirely. I know we're about to turn the corner on sex though which he has notions of but ultimately a very foggy idea about. I don't really have a creedo on that yet, but, I have essentially the same attitude.

I'm sure some amount of television-screen violence hasn't done me any good but the things that really burned holes into my brain as an adolescent were gore videos and stuff like rotten.com, and while I know those things still exist on the internet, I'm actually glad in that sole regard that the internet is a more sanitized place now.

Basically I like to keep the doors open, but I like to be standing right behind my son when he opens the door. And then we can also talk about what was behind the door together and be better off for it.

"Love knows no bounds, so it needs boundaries."

I don't have good sense. Should anyone post or only those with kids?

My son is just reaching the age where he wants to start playing video games. I think the real challenge that parents face today is that control is much harder now. I grew up around cartridges, so, it was easy for my parents to control the games I saw. With the ubiquity of games and game advertising, it’s way more difficult to even be aware of the information flow, much less control it. Plus marketing manipulation has become way more sophisticated than in the past.

At this point, we’re going mostly with the tablet app route. More ostensibly educational stuff on there and way easier to lock down than a gaming console or PC. But once he starts hanging out with people who play Minecraft or whatever the latest hotness is… we’ll just have to play it by ear. (Which is pretty much the definition of parenting IMHO anyway. :) )

Yes, the rule is get off the bloody Paw Patrol game, Dad wants to play Halo.

He's 4 and doesn't have a tablet or anything. But he likes to sit and watch me play games. The consoles are in the living room. No GTA or Mortal Kombat for me until he goes to bed. He's quite liked the Gunk in fairness.

We have friends who have older children who play Roblox and Fortnite. That stage scares the crap out of me.

Given my experience with various gaming communities since 2007, my hypothetical kid isn't playing any games until she can get a debit card.

There are much better hobbies to get into.

Being a parent DOES change your perspective -- to paraphrase the late, great Ryan Davis - big difference between watching Platoon and going to Vietnam. :) I know there are people out there who must have said "parenting is exactly what I expected", but I've never met/heard of them myself.

I spent 15 years of my life wondering and theorizing how I would handle being a parent -- and when it actually happened, almost all that planning went out the window. A lot of it because, when you actually have skin in the game, you become a lot more cautious / a lot more protective. (Or you crack - I know one guy who couldn't handle it, ended up abandoning his family, moved out of the country.) And a lot of it because, yeah, once you see their personality start to come out, you got to work around that, even if it's completely at odds of who you are or what you expect.

For example, I'm a pretty intense introvert, but my kid is all about running up to complete strangers and going "Hello! My name is _____ and this is my daddy _____!" I'm trying to teach him to be at least a little cautious about giving out personal information -- but, the way things are going, he's always going to be way more comfortable about initiating contact than I am, and I'm just going to have to go along for the ride and at least be polite, even if my brain is screaming "Run away, run away, run away."

I have a ten month old son, so this is something that I have been thinking about a lot lately. I remember Jason mentioning his policy on one of the Bombcasts. I don't have the exact quote, but he said something along the lines of not restricting the amount of games his son plays as long as it isn't his only hobby. As a lot of people have said too much of any one thing can be unhealthy. So I think as long as there is some balance in their life that is what is important.

That being said, I think it is ok to set up some time limits. I also think it is important to know when to throw the time limits out the window and let them go wild for a day.

I see a few posts of people without kids talking about future plans or hypothetical plans and I can only tell you that your plans will almost certainly fall apart once you actually have kids.

I have twin 3.5 yr old boys who are in very different places in their video gaming adventure. My initial plan, before having kids was to set limits that relaxes as they age, guide them through their gaming by starting them on games they might enjoy and then progressing through the catalog, and limit phone or tablet time.

Let me tell you that almost all those plans have gone out the window. Both kids started playing "educational" touch games on my wife's phone (I recommend "Sago mini School" and "Sago World"), but we only started them on games during rare occurrences where our daycare was closed, but both me and my wife still had to work from home. We would limit time to about an hour, just so we could get some work done and it worked. I held off on putting phone games on my phone, because I foolishly held on to that reservation that my kids wouldn't get lost in phone games, but it only took a few times of heavy tears and the boys fighting over my wife's phone before I relented so they could play at the same time.

We introduced them to the switch within the past year and started them with some kids touch games(as the controls are so much easier). A coloring book game, and one about a knight (I strongly recommend the knight game "sir tincan.") I learned my lesson about their abilities and about poorly designed children's games (I'm looking at you "little shopping" series). For the most part the switch completely replaced phone time and they were still limited to an hour at a time.

However then my family caught covid (everyone but me). My wife was pretty sick and the boys recovered quickly but weren't allowed back to daycare for two weeks which meant a lot of trying to balance kids and work. During that time one of my kids discovered the tile for "captain toad: treasure tracker" and it became his new obsession. I allowed him to play it and thinking he would grow tired of it when he saw it wasn't touch screen backfired because he just wanted to play more to "learn it". Well to cut this thread short, he eventually learned how to do all the levels in book 1 by himself (with some initial help) and then graduated to Yoshi, and Donkey Kong games.

My other son has had very little interest in playing those games and still asks for phone games when we offer it up. He will even give up the phone well before the hour time limit, while the other one will fight for every second on the switch.

I've learned that no plan works for every child and that circumstances dictate how your kid will handle things. You go with the flow and what your kids can handle, while trying to make the best decision for them.

Tldr: no one rule works for every kid. Introduce them to something they might like in moderation and see how it evolves.. if they don't play it, they might just want something else. All in all most kids will want to do what their parents do.. so if you enjoy playing games and they see you enjoying games they will want to play to. If you dont have restraint they won't either.