While gaming is known to have positive effects on young people’s brains, as it typically requires complex strategizing and fast reaction times, it also tends to be a solitary activity. And excessive solitude can lead to severely compromised social and communication skills. Therefore, a balance is required between allowing a child to enjoy gaming time and preventing them from being isolated in their room, gaming for hours.
Experts at GameTop have prepared the following guide for parents with gamer children to help both kids and their parents find that balance, and minimize the risks of them being negatively affected by gaming.
Sociable Gaming for Children: How to Get it Right
Professionals at GameTop recommend the following tips that can help your children game, while still letting them feel like they are part of an all-important social or family group.
- Mix it up: Encourage kids to balance their gaming with physical (team sports etc.) activities, social interaction, and creative, unstructured real-world play.
- Time limits: Agree on a fixed, limited gaming session time with your child so they have to start interacting with others again soon. Offer a reward for doing so.
- Interaction: Encourage kids to play with other young people outside in the neighborhood. You might even enjoy joining in with them!
- Other activities: Help your children find other stuff to do that they enjoy or are interested in. This could be related to performance, arts or music – anything that gets them creative and interacting with others. Look for local groups or clubs where they can meet like-minded young people. There’s a huge amount to do out there that isn’t gaming.
- Multiplayer games: Suggest your child explore multiplayer games that focus on building communities, where groups collaborate for mutual virtual benefit.
- Make stuff up: Young people can be very inventive. Help them to make-up their own games, and challenge them to beat you at that new game. Children usually relish any opportunity to beat adults at anything.
- Board doesn’t have to mean bored: Set up families ‘game nights’ in which the family plays board games together. Consider even inviting your child’s friends along – the more the merrier!
- Get them to play somewhere busy: Create a special gaming space in the lounge or kitchen rather than their bedrooms to encourage socialization alongside gaming.
Why the Expert’s Advice is So Important
It’s important to start applying these tips at an early age to prevent children from becoming isolated by gaming. When they’re younger, they will be less likely to push back against adult intervention, and accept advice. These recommendations will be more likely to be accepted if put into play early in life, becoming habitual.
Letting kids and young people game alone for endless hours can have multiple negative outcomes. It can harm their eyesight, and lead to real-world cognitive impairment; so their skills may suffer. Excessive gaming in isolation can lead to addiction and diminished academic performance, making school much harder.
Humans are social creatures and depend on communal hierarchies. Socializing and bonding naturally is very good for us. Research has shown that the social development of children who spend a lot of time alone, gaming or on the internet, can be significantly impaired. This can lead to difficulties in building relationships, and relationships are essential to all walks of life.
Confidence is also vital to life. The self-confidence of young people who game a lot in isolation has been found to be low, and their social anxiety levels and aggression are likely to be higher than average. This can be catastrophic in the long run.
The expert’s advice, applied with care by adults when children are young, should help kids get a better start in life. They can lay the foundations for a happier and more fulfilled existence as part of social units from which they can gain vital acceptance and admiration when they become adults.