You don't just have a gaming addiction fortunately, but some parents find the behavior of their children disturbing. How do you deal with the subject of gaming and how do you make good agreements about your child's gaming behavior in order to prevent eventual gaming addiction?
In addition to being addictive, gaming also has good components in it. Gaming fits in with the times and believe it or not, your child can even learn a thing or two from it. Yet it turns out that there are a lot of parents who are concerned about the gaming behavior of their child. We all don't really know what "normal" is. What is permissible and when we are going to cross a line. Research shows that many parents want to allow gaming, but that enforcement is sometimes difficult.
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A game addiction occurs in more than 12,000 Dutch people. The average age of game addicts is about 25 years, but there are also really young children (from 12 years). You can imagine that that fact itself is a disturbing thought for parents. However, that is not immediately necessary.
After all, playing fun games can also have a positive effect on your child's development. For example, if your child games with others, there is also talk of cooperation between the gamers. Making agreements, discussing strategy, communicating with each other. It may happen online, but it does happen. Making contact and communicating (often also in English) is actually quite normal during gaming these days.
In addition to the above, it is also true that with gaming you develop a certain perseverance to pass a level and you have to be able to make decisions quickly.
Yet 83% of parents still have questions about their children's gaming behaviour:it sometimes proves difficult for many parents to stay informed about the type of games their children like to play, with whom they play them and for how long. Enforcing agreements regarding gaming can sometimes be very difficult.
For example, it appears from a press release I received that Tanja Jess has an agreement with her teenagers that they can play one hour a day during the week and two hours a day at the weekend.
I must admit that with us that is a bit more, Fortnite is daily fare. But is that the same reason for fear of game addiction? I did a little research.
First something about parental controls. These are tools that parents can use to monitor their child's gaming behaviour. The most well-known parental controls among parents are tools that limit in-game purchases or shield certain content and/or limit the time of use.
30% of parents often use parental controls. So if you want to have more 'monitoring' of a possible game addiction, at least make use of this. In our case this is actually not necessary, because son is sitting opposite me in the office while I am working behind the PC. So I see and follow everything he does. An advantage of working from home. That is not to say that I never worry about gaming behaviour.
Well, as stated above. If your child plays a lot of games or is on social media, this does not immediately mean that there is a gaming addiction. If you really talk about an addiction to gaming, it often means that excessive use of the internet and gaming leads to bigger problems such as truancy from school (or work) and a lot of quarrels in the family.
The signals below should be monitored if there is a suspicion of game addiction.
It is a topic that comes up quite often with us. I think the word game addiction is still going a bit far, but I do recognize a number of signals to a certain extent. Still, I think it takes some getting used to for us too. It was different in our time. And to be honest… Frank used to play computer games quite often. In fact… he even got this new Commodore 64 mini before Christmas to relive the old times.
I think it is especially important to have a conversation. Continue to talk to each other about any concerns. But also offering alternatives. Nice alternatives. Look, if I tell him to read… then I'm missing the point with a dyslexic who hates reading books. But if I offer to play a game together, it will be completely different.
Some are more prone to gaming addiction than others. Boys, for example, seem to be more prone to gaming addiction than girls. Research also shows that parents of boys deal with gaming within the family differently than parents of girls.
Stricter rules often apply to daughters. For example, boys are more often allowed to play more than 7 hours a week (43%) than girls (23%). Also, 70% of girls are not allowed to play games in which foul language is used, compared to 59% of boys. And girls are less likely to play games above their PEGI age range (62% versus 53% of boys).
Worried about one of your children's gaming addictions? Then there are quite a few organizations that can help you on your way.
In any case, we are going to set rules on this at home together. Rules that he agrees with and that we agree with. Rules where we may both have to compromise.
Most important of all… we are going to follow the rules. In this way I hope that we can avoid a game addiction or at least suppress it at an early stage. Because secretly I do worry.
I personally found this series by the Trimbos Institute quite confrontational. The same situation is filmed from 3 points of view in the family:
