An update: What parents need to know about game addiction.
When I originally wrote this post, “What parents absolutely need to know about game addiction right now,” I was primarily representing my thoughts on other people’s professional opinions. My professional opinion has always been that parents need to have the autonomy to make decisions that work for their family. Parents get to choose what’s right for their kids. Some kids get to play 5 hours a day, some get to play for 30 minutes. Some can only watch PG-rated movies, others can watch the R-rated stuff with the big kids. The parents decide. That’s cool. I get it, and it’s what I support.
Recently I realized that there’s a prerequisite to making the decisions that work for you: understanding what and how much your kids are actually watching or playing. There are obvious limits to what a parent can do, and a very wide variety of constraints can pop up. That’s fine. Some kids are going to get away with more than others. Pretty standard. In this update, I talk about an experience that I had where some younger kids were watching really violent movies and playing really violent game content. The kids in the situation didn’t really bother me, because their parents knew what the kids were consuming, and the parents were setting the limits.
Do you know what your kids are consuming? Now might be a good time to check.
Neils Clark :: Feb.16.2007 :: Games ::
