With video games like Fortnite purposefully designed to be as compelling and ADDICTIVE as possible I have to say I strongly disagree with this article. Your argument that parents disapprove of their children’s excessive gaming due to their own feelings of inadequacy around technology is ridiculous. Your piece sounds to me more like a justification for adults who are either are too lazy to set boundaries for their kids or who want to justify their own love of gaming.
There is never anything that is “all bad” just as there is never anything “all good” but on the matter of gaming I think we need to be clear — don’t we want our children to grow up knowing how to get their basic human needs met in healthy ways? Sure, a little gaming probably never hurt anyone, but when the hours in front of the screen begin to add up you know that important needs just aren’t being met. Our mental health system is bulging at the seams with young people suffering from anxiety and depression and the current age of young people constantly staring into little, or big screens is in large part to blame.
Sure, sit down together and play Fortnite with your kids, and enjoy it. But do this so you can then turn it OFF and model for them what it looks like to NOT be ruled by it. To have it be entertainment but not the focus of life. We should be modeling how to go out and connect with nature and the real world and providing children with opportunities to, god forbid, have the experience of boredom where they may do something or think something they otherwise wouldn’t. For the most part it’s bloody hard to keep our children away from gaming especially our boys and my efforts to keep firm boundaries in our household are certainly not due to any feeling of inadequacy on my part. Just as it would be easier for me to let them eat all the chocolate, chips and ice cream they want instead of putting up with the moans over insisting on healthy food choices, it would be 100 times easier to let our rules lapse around screen time.
However I think its definitely worth fighting to ensure we allow a gap from what would otherwise be an endless stream of mindless input from screens and gaming — a realities that someone else has orchestrated in order to make them wealthy.