Video games and children: A guide for parents
How to create a positive and safe gaming environment for your child.
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Learning, creativity, connections – video games offer some amazing opportunities for children of all ages (and grown-ups). But parents can find it tricky to navigate the topic of video games with their children. What games? How much screen time? What are the risks?
We spoke to video games expert Professor Daniel Johnson, from the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child, to answer these questions and help you to take informed decisions on what’s best for your family.
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🎮 How can parents best engage with their children and video games?
One of the things we really encourage parents to do is to play video games with their children. Sit down and let them teach you how to play. Let them be the expert. Let them have the joy of showing you their worlds.
And what we find from talking to parents is that once they start doing this, their point of view shifts and they can have a much more open dialogue with their children about playing video games.
Engaging with your children in this way helps establish that this is a hobby of theirs that you're interested in learning more about and, hopefully, see the value in. That way, when you're having a conversation with them about video games, they’re not just thinking: “Well, you just don't get it.”
Once your child understands that you do get it, then when you say: “Look, you've had a couple of hours today, that's probably enough,” you’re coming from a much stronger position than just coming in and saying something that might sound to them like: “Why are you doing that stupid thing, that’s a waste of your time.”
Children intuitively understand that's not true. They can tell it's not a waste of their time and it can be alienating to be told that the thing you love is a waste of time.
Building that common ground allows you to have a far more open dialogue about what is appropriate to play, when is it appropriate to play, and who it is appropriate to play with.
"Sit down and let them teach you how to play. Let them be the expert. Let them have the joy of showing you their worlds."
🎮 What benefits can video games offer children and adolescents?
We're all drawn to activities that satisfy our needs for competence, autonomy and relatedness. And video games, when designed well, are incredibly good at satisfying those needs. There are a huge range of benefits that result from videogame play including positive emotion, engagement (associated with happiness), making connections, meaning making, learning and creativity.
Learning and creativity
There are clear learning benefits, both the incidental and directed learning that occur in video games, and obviously there’s a great deal of opportunity for creativity in various types of games – from those where you build a house that you design yourself through to the creativity it takes to solve a difficult puzzle.
We conducted a study with adults in which we compared the brain activity that occurs when completing standard cognitive tests (from the University of Cambridge) vs playing a videogame. We found that the difficult levels of the game were associated with similar levels of brain activity as the more difficult cognitive tests. In short, videogame play involved a high level of engagement and cognitive activity.
Overcoming challenges
In general, when growing up and throughout life, it’s really beneficial to expose yourself to challenges, to do difficult things, to tackle something you don’t think you can do. Video games are excellent at providing these challenges and there’s emerging evidence that they teach resilience as a result. You learn to try, to fail and to try again.
Making connections
Games are great at building connections with other people. There are real social connections being made by people playing with others. Even when it’s purely online and not necessarily translating into offline settings, the resulting intimacy and the social capital are very real and very valuable. It’s no different to the friendship you make playing rugby, netball or doing dance class or drama. There is a huge amount of research that confirms this time and time again – playing with others both allows us to connect with a large diversity of other people, broadening our networks as well as allowing us to deepen and strengthen bonds with those close to us.
"You learn to try, to fail and to try again."
🎮 What are some of the risks around video games that parents should know about?
Know who your child plays with
I think we need to be thinking about who our children are playing with? Who are they meeting online? What level of awareness does a child have about what information to provide or not provide to a stranger online, or even to someone they think they know online?
There are some very bad actors out there, but there are lots of ways that we can combat that. For example, as a parent you can use in-game controls to switch off the ability to connect with strangers.
Again, it’s much easier if your child feels like you understand their passion for video games. If they do, then you can say something like: “I get it. I know you want to play. That makes sense to me, but let's make sure that the platform you’re on is with other kids from your school, not one that has people we don't know, or one that might have people of a very different age to you.”
Underscoring the importance of building trust around videogames, it's extremely important that your child feels like they can come to you if something concerning or uncomfortable happens. We want to avoid a situation where they are worried that they'll be "in trouble", or likely to banned from playing if they bring a concern to you.
Unhealthy engagement
I prefer to avoid terms like “addiction”, as I don't think they are necessarily appropriate in this setting and I also think the term often causes undue concern. However, there is no doubt that it is possible to develop an unhealthy engagement with videogames (albeit for a minority of players).
Research has found that unhealthy engagement is most likely to occur when other areas of life are not satisfying. If a child is feeling a lack of competence or autonomy, or not feeling connected to others at school or in some other area of life, the result can be an unhealthy engagement with video games (where those needs are being met).
Fortunately that also gives us a clue as to the solution when we’re worried a child is engaging with video games in a way that might be unhealthy. Somewhat counterintuitively, the solution is not to try to remove video games from the child's life. In fact, if video games are the one place that a child is having their needs met, then the worst thing you could do is to cut that off. But we need to begin to fulfil these needs from other areas of life as well. Encourage them to try some outdoor activities or to spend more time with other friends with different hobbies. What’s important is to try and build up the other areas of life to run alongside video games.
Dark patterns
There are unscrupulous design techniques sometimes referred to as “dark patterns” (or deceptive patterns) that encourage the user to do something they otherwise wouldn’t do, such as spend more money. Such design can be problematic, so parents should try to open their children’s eyes to such manipulations. For example, the use of false sales that create time pressure to buy, or the use of discount schemes that encourage you to buy more.
Try to engage with your children around what they're playing and if it is a game that contains elements of this kind of design, then try to steer them towards other games or have an open conversation about what you see.
Teach them about these techniques, so they can be better armed to detect them and resist them. Moreover, recognition of such techniques are skills that will also help them in other areas of life.
Toxic communities
The communities that surround some games can be problematic (often referred to as “toxicity”) and can involve things like cyberbullying, racism, homophobia and misogyny.
There's great work going on to try and combat these things, but at the moment there are certain games that are known for having such communities.
It’s important for parents to be aware of the communities that their child is playing in and to consider if it is one you want them to be exposed to regularly. Talk to your child about what sort of things are OK and not OK, when you should speak up on someone else's behalf, or choose to exit a conversation.
Video games and violence
When it comes to violence and aggression in games, it’s important to consider the themes in a game and whether or not such themes are appropriate for your child at that point in their development. The age ratings and online reviews by other parents can be invaluable to inform decisions on what game is appropriate or not. Playing with your children can help you to get a better sense of what a new game involves.
It’s also important to note that the current scientific consensus is that video games do not lead to aggression or violence in person. While video games have received a lot of negative attention over the years, a landmark report in 2020 brought together 28 studies on the topic and found that the long-term effects of violence in games on youth aggression is next to zero.
🎮 Many parents worry about how much time their children spend playing video games. What’s your advice?
What is an appropriate amount of video game play time varies a lot. If it's the middle of school term and a child has a bunch of homework due the next day, then the right amount of play might be zero minutes.
If it's the school holidays and they spent yesterday at the beach and they're spending tomorrow at a museum, then maybe a lot of play is fine today. It also depends on the child. It depends on what they're playing. It depends on who they're playing with.
I think the difference between a healthy adult player and a child player is the child hasn’t necessarily developed the emotional regulation skills to realize: “Oh, this has stopped being fun. I'm experiencing more frustration than joy at this stage. Now would be a good time to take a break.” And certainly, adult gamers don't get this right all the time either!
Keep an eye on that with children and try to help them learn the signs for when they've had enough play, when would it be better to go take a walk for half an hour or whatever to distract themselves and reset.
Interestingly, there’s good research that shows that taking a short break can really improve your performance in a video game, so that might be one way to start a conversation on the topic of breaks.
More broadly, it can be really useful to talk to children about how we all need to manage our engagement with technology (whether phones, games, social media etc). Consider acknowledging any challenges you experience managing your own technology engagement – what has worked for you and what hasn’t, and the broader benefits of taking a balanced approach.
🎮 Do you have any tips for parents of younger children on how to start out with games?
The rating systems can be really helpful, but the problem is that a lot of the content on mobile stores doesn't have a rating.
Other parents have been down this path before though, and there are some great communities and forums where people highlight the strengths and weaknesses of different games, along the lines of: “This game is pretty good for playing with other people, but it's got a bunch of monetization stuff in it that you'll want to keep an eye on.”
The other thing is learning about what in-game controls and options that you as a parent can turn on and off. For example, you may be able to turn off the ability to connect with strangers, or you can require a friend request to come through you rather going directly to your child.
And again, I really would encourage parents to engage with their kids. I'm not saying the parent should be there for every minute the child plays. But if you play the first hour with your child, you'll know what's in that game, you can see how they react to it and can decide on the best approach.
🎮 What do you think the gaming industry could do better?
I think those dark or deceptive design elements need to be called out and really thought about.
Are they ever appropriate? If they are ever appropriate, what age group are they appropriate for?
I think we can agree that is not appropriate for a 5-year-old to be playing a game in which a character suggests they ask their parent for money to buy something in the game.
It would be great to see App stores having a vetted section where parents and children can select from games that have been verified as not containing problematic elements. Or a more useful rating system, so it's not just flagging that this game is violent, but this game has monetization that will encourage your child to spend money, or this game allows the player to connect with people all around the world without really knowing who they are. Information like this is needed for us to really tackle some of the risks we've talked about.
Professor Daniel Johnson is a chief investigator at the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child and leads the Games Research and Interaction Design Lab at the Queensland University of Technology in Australia.
