When you get older, many times you also lose the ability to actively engage with your children, primarily due to aging. When this happens, this also typically coincides with a time when your children are old enough to start playing with video games. However, as tempting as it may be to just let your children play video games all the time, it may not be the best move when it comes to the long-term growth of your children. Today we’ll discuss video games in depth and how to approach them with your children moving forward.
Video games have become hugely popular over the years, particularly with teenagers in the United States. Ever since 2016, the average video-game-playing teenager was found to play over 6 hours of video games a week, with that number continuing to rise every year. While almost an hour a day playing video games doesn’t seem like much, it definitely is considering that in many cases most of those hours occur on the weekend when teenagers can definitely find better use of their time. They could instead be engaging with friends by going out to the mall or the movies, or simply spending quality time with family.
Video games not only cause young people to become anti-social in the long-run, but they also can create health problems in more severe cases. The most common problem involves degrading vision, due to staring at bright screens for hours at a time. In addition, staying up late nights can cause teenagers to lose out on valuable hours of sleep, which can lead to stunted growth if they are still in their puberty years. And many video-gamers tend to eat more junk food to facilitate more time with their video games, which can lead to numerous health problems due to overall poor nutrition.
So how can you combat the social and health issues associated with playing video games? The answer is to simply play in moderation. The truth is that video games are not particularly harmful if played for only a few minutes a day. The problems only start to come about when video games play a larger role in a young teenager’s life. As the parent, all it takes is enforcing video game limits – for example just 30 minutes per day – to ensure that your child can enjoy video games, while not succumbing to all of the negative aspects that are often associated with them. In a world where you want your children to enjoy the quintessential teenager activity, while still being a good parent, moderation is the only way to go.