parents are less involved in their kids livesit’s no longer safe for kids to play outside in many placessocietal distancing is worse then everthere’s a mental health crisis that has been ignoredthere’s a lack in healthy role models and an abundance of toxic onesall across the world there’s political turmoil caused by politicians convincing the people to hate eachother rather than those in poweraddiction has been normalized, kids watch their parents glued to their phones and they learnkids are taught that they can become anything but will need to come to grips with the reality that they simply cannot- Muh video games
Video game addiction is a symptom of multiple societal issues, you cannot simply solve it dealing with the symptom.
But it’s so much easier to just blame the one thing, pretend to do something about it, and claim we’ve made progress.
It’s not just that it’s easier to not fix the fundamental societal issues, it’s that the politicians make money from not fixing them.
By “no longer safe to play outside” are you referring to the people operating child murdering trucks?
What else are they gonna do? Play outside in the 100+heat highway adjacent parking lot?
We closed all the youth centers, made it illegal to loiter, banned them from places like coffee shops and malls, made parks miles away from residential home, prevented them from any mobility until they’re 16… It’s those damn video games!
I mean god forbid we let them go outside and have unstructured time. They might get addicted to something.
10 years old… impossible to resist
The solution here is parenting.
I have kids that age, my kids have consoles, and they don’t play into the wee hours of the morning. Why? Because I don’t let them. I don’t have draconian parental controls or whatever, I just tell them they’re not allowed and put consequences in place if they disobey. As they get older, the allowed playtime goes up, provided they’re meeting their obligations.
It’s not rocket surgery, just don’t suck at being a parent.
That said, I imagine there are cases where even a good parent can not notice deviant behavior like this. But for the vast majority, a few rules and regular checking in should cover it.
Every console and PC has parental controls that limit screen time. It’s 100% on parents if they don’t set it up.
Or, do what my mom did and take it away. I hated her for it, but I admit 20 years later that that was called parenting.
I refuse to use parental controls, because I know my kids will find a way around it (I would). I instead set firm rules with relatively severe consequences if they’re not followed. Once I login to the PC, there’s no time limit, content filters, etc.
That said, my youngest kept getting into the Switch and messing up peoples’ saves, so I put a parental lock on it, but I told my older kids the code and told them I trust them with it. If they abuse their time with it, they lose the console privilege.
It seems to be working. I’ll probably give them a PC soon since they’re doing a decent job stopping when their timer goes off (they set the timer according to our rules). We have limits (2hr max per day, must be done with homework, they earn time by reading), but again, I don’t enforce them with software, I enforce them with the threat of loss of privileges.
I think that’s great! There’s no thing that works universally. My suggestion for parental controls was more, hey this is the ambare minimum, it’s 5 minutes of setting it up, just so it rather than blaming games.
Why are so many old people addicted to propaganda?
Serious boomer shit that somehow managed to completely miss the question of why the kid was that heavily into games in the first place. The very idea was mentioned once, in the whole article. As an aside. Blegh.
Taking the question at face value - probably because addiction is the business model now.
Only legislation will fix this.
We need more third places that kids, teens, AND adults can access. Without needing to drive to them.
If I were young I would totally play all the games I could. They young ones saw 2008, pandemic, wars, inflation. If not escapism then what?
What else are you going to fill your hollow existence with before you kill yourself
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Dee had read a newspaper article about a new NHS National Centre for Gaming Disorders that was being set up; she made contact, but the service wasn’t taking on patients yet.
The story of Dee – and Jake, who agreed to be featured in this article, but preferred not to be interviewed – is depressingly familiar to Professor Henrietta Bowden-Jones OBE, the founder and director of the National Centre for Gaming Disorders.
In 2008, she founded the first National Problem Gambling clinic: the NHS now has the capacity to treat up to 3,000 patients a year in 15 centres across the UK based on Bowden-Jones’s methodology.
We sat in a grand, high-ceilinged room in Earl’s Court, which is also the current base for the gambling clinic, and discussed what form an article might take.
The centre, which had been set up with a plan to see all patients face-to-face in London, pivoted swiftly to video calls, which remains the format its therapy sessions still take.
Bowden-Jones has been pushing for urgent extra funding and the clinic has taken the difficult decision to pause family work: this has brought the assessment waiting time down from over a year to three months.
The original article contains 2,281 words, the summary contains 200 words. Saved 91%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Parents not being good at setting boundaries. Not setting times to go to bed, not limiting time spent playing games or on electronics, and not checking in on how they are doing with school work. They are the ones controlling the finances of what can be bought and used in the household, but they just become pushovers.
