Decision 4 of 7
How do we handle video games?
The short answer
Judge the game, not the hours. A child building something in a sandbox game with a friend, or beating a level after forty tries, is doing something with real value. A child grinding a daily login streak so a company can sell them a cosmetic item is doing something else entirely, and it is not their fault they cannot tell the difference. The most useful sorting question is not how long they played. It is who makes money from the next twenty minutes.
Three ways to do this
These all point the same direction. They are rungs on a ladder rather than options on a menu, so start wherever you can actually hold the line. A rule you keep beats a rule you announce.
Start here
Turn off in-game purchases and remove games built around daily streaks and battle passes. Keep the rest.
For families who are not looking to cut gaming, just to remove the parts engineered to be compulsive.
Going further
Games happen in a shared room, and multiplayer only with people your kid actually knows. Sessions end at a natural stopping point rather than a timer.
For families who want gaming to stay social and visible rather than solitary.
All the way
Co-op and single-player games only, on a console in the living room, at set times. No live-service games and no open voice chat with strangers.
For families who would rather set the pattern now than negotiate it later.
Sort games by who pays
“Video games” covers things with almost nothing in common. Lumping them together is why so many conversations about them go nowhere.
Some games you buy once. The people who made it were paid when you bought it, and they have no further interest in how long you play. These games end. They have credits.
Other games are free, or nearly, and make money continuously while you play, through cosmetics, battle passes, loot boxes and currency. These games are designed by people whose job is to keep sessions going and bring you back tomorrow. Daily rewards, streaks that break if you miss a day, limited-time events that end on Sunday. None of that is there for your child’s benefit.
That distinction will serve you better than any age rating. A ten-year-old playing a bought-once puzzle game for ninety minutes is fine. The same child spending twenty minutes a day maintaining a streak is being farmed.
What games are actually good for
We are not against this. Games do things worth having.
They are one of the few places left where children fail repeatedly at something difficult and keep going. That is genuinely hard to arrange elsewhere, and it is worth a lot.
They are also social infrastructure now. For many kids, playing together online is how friendship happens on a wet Tuesday, and cutting it off can be a real social cost rather than an imaginary one. Take that seriously when you weigh it.
Some are creative tools in disguise. Building, designing, problem-solving, occasionally programming. A kid who makes things in a game is doing something much closer to model-building than to watching television.
What this looks like in daily life
Turn off in-app purchases at the account level, not the game level. This takes five minutes and removes the entire economic engine behind the compulsive design.
Look at what they play with them, once, properly. Ask them to show you. You will learn more in twenty minutes of being shown a game than in a year of reading about it, and it lands very differently from an inspection.
Prefer stopping points to timers. “Finish the level” respects the thing that makes games satisfying. A timer cutting off mid-match creates a genuine grievance and teaches nothing.
Voice chat with strangers is a different decision from gaming. You can allow one and not the other, and most parents who think they have allowed a game have actually allowed an open channel to adults they have never met.
What to say
When you want to understand what they are playing:
“Show me. I want to see what’s good about it.”
When a game has a daily streak:
“See how it punishes you for missing a day? That’s not part of the game. That’s the part that’s there to make sure you come back.”
When time is up mid-match:
“Finish the round. Then we’re done.”
Then hold it, because you have just made a reasonable deal and the whole thing depends on both sides keeping it.
When this doesn’t apply
For some kids, particularly those who find in-person socialising hard, online games are not a substitute for friendship. They are where the friendship is. Be very careful about removing that, and think about what replaces it before you do.
Competitive play at a serious level is its own thing, closer to a sport than a pastime, and it deserves the same conversation you would have about any demanding commitment rather than this one.
Talk about it too
Rules do half the work. These are the conversations that do the other half, written for every age from four up.
- Designed to be hard to put downThe difficulty you feel stopping was engineered by people who are very good at their jobs. It is not a flaw in you.
- Who pays for freeIf you are not paying for something, someone else is, and they are paying for your attention. That single fact explains most of how these products behave.