Children and Videogames
On a thread at Pharyngula, I post some comments going against the grain there, though I have two or three other posters on my side. I’ll edit and restate my words here. (OK, using the present tense is a bit silly a week and a half after the post. Cut me some slack. I’ve been busy.)
Children have a different view of videos games than many of us adults do. (Though some of us younger adults have never grown out of that stage.) They have grown up interacting with advanced 3D graphics forming narratives, puzzles, and challenges of coordination or strategy. These games represent a significant pastime, no less important to them than baseball or football would be to a true adult fan. For more and more, significant portions of their social life are built upon interests and knowledge shared with their peers of these games and game systems and accessories, as well as time actually shared playing them. Whereas “being a gamer” several years ago meant being in a somewhat specialized and often stigmatized niche, nowadays it’s become much more respectable.
This rapid change over the past fifteen years—moving from Pac-man and Asteroids to Quake and Halo—has caused a real gap in experience between parents and children. Really getting involved in a video game is an alien experience for many parents nowadays. Instead of simple tests of skill and reflexes, many of today’s games rely heavily on storyline and graphical beauty to make the game compelling. Many of the games require significant commitments of time to earn characters strong enough, or enough game money, to continue. The levels achieved in the game can be significant attainments, something the gamer can feel proud of. While modern games have become much better about making it easier to put down the game and pick it back up later without losing too much, many of them haven’t. Playing a game these days can be a very meaningful activity.
Online games make the commitments even more real, since instead of interacting with programmer-created personalities, the gamers are interacting with other real gamers through a limited and directed channel designed by the game programmers. But despite these limitations a full social atmosphere is created. Considerable pressure on the gamer is exerted in the form of codes for behavior, which can involve various aspects game etiquette governing the behavior of the player in various situations. These codes certainly aren’t universal, any more than parallel codes in real life are, nor are they universally respected, but they must be considered.
Besides this, online games usually offer a much higher ceiling for accomplishment, so that there’s plenty of room at the top for people to put in hundreds or even thousands of hours and still have room for improvement. This increases both the pride gamers take in accomplishment and the gamers’ emotional investment in general.
These things are quite often completely unknown by the parents. It’s no surprise that serious tension can often result from this lack of understanding. The parent, having legitimate needs, a right to demand certain duties from the child, will sometimes demand that the child perform those duties at times that, from the child’s perspective, are quite inopportune, though from a healthy perspective often quite reasonable. The child sometimes plays long hours at the game, and the parent can form a perception of laziness or spoildness on the child’s part.
When the gamer has been playing a solo game for a period of time, often she’s fairly immersed in the experience. It can be emotionally difficult to put the game down, just as it would be to stop reading a compelling novel in the middle of an interesting passage. And when she goes into one of those online sessions, she’s making a fairly serious commitment to the others in her team that she’s going to play and finish playing.
When a parent interrupts one of these sessions, in a way that shows no respect for the involvement or commitments of the gamer, it can be incredibly frustrating to her. So often, parents expect that the gamer ought to simply drop the game at whatever moment, and if they don’t that they’re being “pushy, greedy, arrogant, and rude”. But in reality—oftentimes—the parent is the one exhibiting the insensitivity. These relationships and commitments just don’t seem real to the parent, even though they’re very real to the child, so they don’t know to respect them. This can lead to conflicts like in the video PZ linked to. The parents say “it’s just a game”, and the kids feel denigrated and belittled besides the immediate disappointment and frustration and even embarrassment.
This conflict isn’t necessary, though. The parents’ needs can be met perfectly well by always making it clear beforehand what times are available to the child for this sort of recreation, and perhaps setting some soft time limits on it so that the parent is ensured enough of the child’s time to do chores and such. And more importantly, the parents can make sure that their children understand that they respect and understand what it’s like to play a videogame.
In the linked video, the child is screaming abuse at the mother. This sort of thing certainly can’t be excused, but I think it’s important to examine the kind of family situation that leads to this kind of encounter. (I grew up in such a family.) It’s often one in which there is very little trust between the child and the parent in any situation. As the parents are the ones that have the responsibility to earn the trust of the child to begin with, I think that from a larger perspective the parents can be blamed for the verbal abuse too.
Then again, in a situation where one party has all of the power, and controls all or most aspects of the kids’ lives from an early age, there’s not much that the parents can’t be blamed for, except in the sense that the parents’ ignorance of good parenting skills are the result of other circumstances, and then we can blame those circumstances. And that chain of reasoning can go on ad nauseum.
But say we’re using blame to assign responsibility for changing the circumstances that led to the blameworthy event, based on who is in a social position to change the situation—who has the power, in other words. This seems to me to be a pretty reasonable definition. With this definition, I think the parents here share about equal blame with the child. They’re the ones that can stop the destructive patterns that lead to this kind of interaction in the first place. The child, on the other hand, can certainly try to explain why the game is so important and try to negotiate some uninterrupted time. (If they’ve done so and the parents are not interested, more blame shifts to them.)
Now, if we modify our definition to take into account the different agents’ abilities, not just the avenues theoretically open to them, the blame shifts. The fact that the child, being young, is less likely to have the mental maturity and language skill to negotiate better circumstances for herself lessens her blame in this situation, I think.
Many of the commenters in that thread were incredibly irked by the child in the video’s behavior. What follows is a small sample.
Thats nuts. If that was my kid I’d break the disk over his head, donate the Xbox, and ban him to his room..
If my daughter ever talked to me like that she’d get her xbox taken away til she was 18 and she wouldn’t be able to do anything else fun for at least two months. To start.
It is the mother’s fault. The first “shit” would have been enough to have me simply pull the plug and smash the X-Box.
A fairly serious commitment? Nonsense. It’s a fricken video game.
To all of these people: Your reactions really rub me the wrong way. When I was growing up my parents took the same attitude toward me. I feel that it was dehumanizing to a degree. It betrayed a lack of respect for my anger, and a lack of understanding of my values. It’s hard to know what you would do if you actually had a child like that, because if you did you wouldn’t be the parent you are, but if your own children ever do start to act like that, don’t take it as a sign of disrespect to you. Take it as a sign of their frustration. Try to understand what’s going on instead of reacting so unthinkingly.
The kid in the video, in all likelihood, has been interrupted unreasonably by his mother many times in the past. He’s feeling very betrayed, and likely, is justified. He’s not right to abuse the mother, but it’s probably the only way he feels he can defend himself against the humiliation of being forced to pull away from something he feels is so important.
To belittle the game without understanding its importance to them is just to engender more distrust from your child. It takes maturity to realize that leaving a session like that is, normally, really no big deal. Make sure they have that maturity, and you’ll solve a lot of problems a lot better than the knee-jerk (and to the kid, very offensive) “I’ll show him who’s boss: I’ll just throw it away” reactions. The kid in the video, as many others, doesn’t understand that a single video game session simply isn’t that important. That they don’t should be expected—it’s not some huge character flaw. In this kind of situation, what I would do as a parent is let the immediate situation pass, and then explain to the kid later how to put a game down.
What, you say, “too bad cutting them off is offensive. They need to learn their lesson.” What lesson does it teach them to take away something important to them because you don’t think it’s as important as they do, and because it’s interfering with their (otherwise valid) responsibilities to you? Remember, your kid probably agrees that they have a responsibility to take out the dishes or water the cats or whatever. (Even if they won’t admit it out loud, they do.) What the difference between you is, is that they think this session of counterstrike is too important to stop just to go do this or that chore. To simply take away something they hold that important can only lead to offense, bitterness, and an even more antagonistic relationship than they probably already have with you. The proper reaction is to respect how important they think it is and try to convince them that it isn’t actually that important, or that they have to spend less time to fulfill their familial responsibilities (which come first), or something.
Don’t be motivated more by a desire to assert your power over your child, to “save face”, to get revenge against the insult of their disrespect. You should have a genuine concern in the well-being of your relationship. Something to consider.
As a final note, I’m not saying that suspending their game playing “privileges”* isn’t a valid reaction. Nonetheless, yanking their controller out of their hands or the box out of the wall is definitely and obviously the wrong way to right your child’s imbalance. I mean, stop and think about it.
It gives them the impression that they’re being misunderstood and not valued as a person, which doesn’t incline them to change their values. Maybe taking the game away for a time (but not interrupting too badly) or limiting their time on it would be appropriate, but you have to realize—as PZ does—that your goal should be to change their priorities, to change what the value, to change what’s important to them. If taking them game away seems like the best thing to do that, then go ahead. But in many situations, it could be counterproductive.
But. I think if you take the game away from them with the attitude that it’s a punishment for their disobedience when they didn’t put the game down, it’s most likely going to be counterproductive. If you communicate that you’re taking it away because it’s evidence that their interest has crossed the line into the unhealthy, and you think a little privation could balance their lives, then it has a chance of working, along with other conversations, etc. But. I still have my doubts about that. I think you should consider it carefully first. Sometimes there’s really no way you can encourage them to have other interests without impinging pretty seriously on their interests and wishes. I get the feeling from PZ’s hyperbole in the main post, and in others’ comments, that the attitude they would take would be one of punishment, not correction, not education, not growth, and not respect. I’ll say it again: Respect is vital.
It’s the difference between communicating to your kid that you don’t value their values and that you disagree with them. Children react very positively to the latter (which is why religion runs in families) but negatively to the former, as I’ve personally experienced.
* Oh, oh, how I hate that term. Please, please don’t use that term for something like playing video games. You already have virtually complete control over the life of your child. More or less everything that they have access to is a privilege you give to them. There is absolutely no reason to remind them of this fact, except to gloat in your power, and belittle their growing independence, and using the term “privileges” is a pretty good way to remind them.
November 12th, 2005 at 18:25
It’s not so inappropriate to my kid’s age that you directed me this way: I have a 3 and a half year old who LOVES the games at PBS Kids, and also rocks hard on the Blue’s Clues game. In this instance, our kids have relatively sympathetic parents: John works at a major video game company, so we get the cultural relevance of gaming, and both of us are ‘lose ourselves’ concentrators. When I’m blogging/reading/writing/coding, I become utterly immersed and it takes work to access me.
Also, Ripley takes some time to change gears, and we try to respect that. Whether it’s reading, playing a game, or going from outside to inside or vice versa, we need to give him adequate transition time or temper tantrums ensue. There is a limit to what’s acceptable in that tantrum, though: expression of anger is different than hitting or name calling.
I didn’t go read the original post, but some of the reactions are examples of ideas about parenting that I’ve really had to sift through since becoming a parent.
There’s a sense out there that parents are responsible for their kids’ behaviour: which is true, to an extent - the problem is, that it’s not universally true (or even desirable). There’s pressure on parents to “control” their “beastly” kids in public, and lots of head shaking when kids get out of control. It is true that parents are the adults and their kids see them as the universe: therefore, there’s a need for parental responsibility, commitment, and work. Unfortunately, there’s no one way that works for all kids: the punitive comments to me reflect more the messages we give *parents* about the way their kids should behave than any real sense of understanding of the dynamics. IE: If your kids are being beastly, it’s because you’re a horrible person and parent.
The problem is that parents do not control the personality of a child, they can only provide frameworks and lessons through which a child’s self and emotions are channelled. This is hard when your kids are very different from you. When I was a kid, I was deeply hurt by my mom’s “mismanagement” of me at times - now, I understand that she didn’t have a crystal ball to see into my heart, and I didn’t have the ability or language to make myself explicit. I made the mistake of parenting Ripley as the young me would have wanted to be parented. Utterly, completely irrelevant to who he was/is right now - frustrated him (and me) to no end. I’ve had to cast around a lot, and actually (for him), the best system seems to be time outs and privilege removal without much discussion. Sometimes, though, he lodges a complaint that we’re being unfair, and I will always listen if I see that’s what is going on. There will be times that I don’t know that’s how he’s feeling, and I will look totalitarian to him. The best I can do is try to show that “the door is open”, and hope that he’s able to step through it.
It comes down to respect, I guess. I respect Ripley, even when I don’t utterly understand where he’s at.
Anyway, I’m getting the sense that the kid’s feelings were getting roundly disrespected and you’re sticking up for the kid, and I have to agree. Even if the kid was being exceedingly disrespectful, responding with disrespect teaches nothing but Hobbesian big-stick values. I would respect the kid more than what’s being described, but also expect respect. With Ripley, removing privileges would be the way to go - although it sounds like that system rubs you the wrong way. Parents do have to have some way of responding to culturally inappropriate behaviour if they’re hoping to raise children who will be able to function in the culture…. As a hippie kid, I saw and experienced ultra permissive lack-of-parenting that left some of us under-socialized, and some of us scared by a chaotic world. Of course, it may very well work for some parents and kids: I believe one such philosophy is encapsulated in the non-coersive parenting movement.
Interesting post!
November 12th, 2005 at 20:21
“There’s a sense out there that parents are responsible for their kids’ behaviour”
I know that the “screaming 4-year-old in a restaurant” scenario does still incite poor thoughts against the parents in me. I wonder to what extent it’s legitimate.
“responding with disrespect teaches nothing but Hobbesian big-stick values”
Well put.
“removing privileges would be the way to go - although it sounds like that system rubs you the wrong way.”
I’m not sure why. I can see where, ideally, it could be a necessary step. Perhaps what bugs me is parents that think it’s all they need to do. Instead of setting guidelines letting the child know where they went wrong and how they can improve, they get some arbitrary “ten-days without videogames” punishment with little connection to improving the actual family dynamics that are broken. Perhaps in combination with a clear policy of “here’s what you have to do to get back into my good graces and then you can play again” I would approve of it. It puts the child in control of their own reactions and relations, which is the right thing to do in the situation, I think. Otherwise it’s a simple and raw form of punishment, and carrot/stick parenting is dehumanizing, and ineffective. Ask Alfie Kohn.
November 12th, 2005 at 20:24
Alfie Kohn interview. Pretty good.
November 12th, 2005 at 20:28
BTW, I don’t think that all kinds of “punishment”, like say privation of games or TV, or timeouts and such, are necessarily punishment in the sense Alfie Kohn is talking about, and I think he’d agree. Some of these things that are traditionally used to punish can also have other useful purposes in the right framework, such as letting tempers cool or giving the child a chance to interact with other things.
November 12th, 2005 at 23:18
I’m not sure I completely agree with Kohn: although my arguments with him are in execution rather than the basic philosophy that internal motivations are better motivators than external ones. So bear with my carpetblogging.
Again, I think it depends on the kid; and, I think you’ve hit in on the head that discipline needs to be part of a larger relationship with a child. If a parent is just trying to modify behaviour and not really enjoying or attempting to relate to their kid, the overall message to the kid is pretty heinous.
(Still, since becoming a parent I’m less judgemental - for some parents, getting through the day without exploding may very well be what they’re able to provide. Abuse is inexcusable, but lack of sensitivity makes more sense to me now than it did when I was solely on the other side of the equation.)
With Kohn’s analysis, I conditionally agree for myself and for other kids I’ve cared for. As a kid, I didn’t need rewards or punishments, really: just a way to own and explore behaviour. Fundamentally, I felt reward in getting along and understanding. With kids like I was, non-coercive education and discipline worked. I’m a classic introvert, though, and am motivated with respect to myself for a variety of societally approved behaviours: education, lack of conflict, nurturance. I am risk-avoidant, though, and in this way I’d need exernal reinforcement to learn HOW to take risks.
Also, external reward has sometimes led to new avenues of exploration. I wasn’t a maths/sciences kid in high school: it was an entirely external reward that put me on that path - although internal motivation kept me going.
What is it that moderates our behaviours, anyway? So much of our behaviour is contextual, cultural. For example, in Canada, we line up for things like busses and in shops. In many other parts of the world, that’s not the way it’s done. You put a Canadian in a pushing mass, and everyone seems uncaring and uncivil. Why? It’s not a norm that will be arrived at simply by internal motivations, but parenting and cultural environment. Our parents may tell us to be less pushy or whack us if we push or reward us as we learn to pull back, but they’re forcing a non-instinctual conformist behaviour on their offspring…
There’s culture and community, and those things are external - your motivation is to fit into the tribe. Much of childrearing is this socialization. Some kids are more *self* motivated to find and fit the tribal rules. Some kids like to challenge the tribal rules. My feeling, as a parent, is that my children should know the tribal rules and how to respect them, and how to make a cojent argument for rejecting those rules. Civil disobedience is okay with me, but only in the context of constructed argument, not in the context of sheer selfishness. (Rosa Parks, though a lawbreaker, was not the moral equivalent of a rapist.)
Anyway, my sister is someone who likes to break, to challenge. She’s an extrovert, too, who is motivated primarily by her reflection in the community. She needed a lot more stars-on-charts to do her part in taking care of the housework than I did, because she didn’t care about cleanliness to the same degree that her community did. (And do all of us really care about everything to the same standard that the community has decided is acceptable? Not really.)
The thing is to pick and choose. Not to go out of the way to own or take over something that your kid IS self motivated to do: to let them know that you see and support their pride in their own achievements: but to give a child the tools they need to make their case in the community. That might mean stars on a chart for chewing with their mouth closed, or time outs for nagging/whining/hurting self or others, if those things aren’t within the kid’s makeup, and rigorously avoiding stars on charts for the times kids show empathy on their own - and this is why parenting is so tricky, and so many people make lots of money selling books to insecure parents who are sure they’re failing.
Frankly, kids with parents who are trying to relate and do the right thing probably do better than any kid parented under any rigourous philosophy… Which is what I’m hearing in your comments.
Well. Thanks for that. Lots of fun to think about what I do all day….
November 13th, 2005 at 10:28
“I am risk-avoidant, though, and in this way I’d need exernal reinforcement to learn HOW to take risks. […] Also, external reward has sometimes led to new avenues of exploration.”
I don’t know about this. While I obviously can’t say for sure, perhaps the rewards don’t deserve so much credit from you here. Even Kohn wouldn’t say that they automatically spoil whatever behavior they enforce, though they often do. You were in a situation where you just needed to be introduced to the benefits of some changed behavior, then you’d see for yourself the benefits of them. You probably didn’t need rewards, specifically, or even any form of external motivation, to discover your interest in math/science. You could have just picked up a good piece of fiction in the library that inspired the interest in you. And, later in life, befriending someone who was a risk taker, along with some introspection, could have introduced you to some of the benefits. So even though rewards are capable of accomplishing a little bit long term, in some people, it’s only because they can see past the punishment/reward aspect and reflect on whether the behavior it’s trying to produce is desirable independently, and that’s probably not a terribly common ability. (That you and I have it is why, in a culture dominated by punishment and reward, we are relatively healthy.)
Then again, when the ultimate motivation that will produce X behavior, say open-mouth-chewing, is external anyway, punishment might not make a difference. You’re just doing at an early age manually what will eventually be done with social mores. (Good point about those.) But what about something like nagging/whining? That one’s more complicated. In an adult, what keeps them from doing it with, say, a romantic partner is understanding their partner’s good intentions, limited energy and attention, and not wanting to tire and annoy them with whininess. That sort of understanding is a lot to expect from a child. I don’t know what age one can legitimately expect them to understand that. I think they probably understand enough not to do it with non-parents by the age of seven or eight, but parents are really hard to fully humanize in the child’s mind. If at all, it happens in the teens, usually. You know, I bet it has something to do with the child feeling needed in order to run family affairs. That they have real responsibilities in the family that really help and aren’t just busywork. But my point is that ideally, you’d figure out how to create the genuine, mature understanding that motivates them to refrain from whining as soon as possible. (Hopefully it’s possible before the teen years, though I imagine that would be quite an accomplishment too.) If you used punishment and rewards to prevent the behavior beforehand, it might be better overall than if you didn’t. Or maybe not. It probably depends on the kid.
Now, the issue with videogames, or even TV, is even more complicated. If your child is playing more videogames or watching more television than you’d like them to, what are you to do? If they are able to put the game down when required to, and get the rest of their work done, and otherwise fulfill all of their other obligations, but you’re still uneasy about the time they spend on it, here you have a legitimate conflict of values. You think they should find other things more important than they do. And in an area like this, rewards and punishment are completely inappropriate, I think. Because there’s never going to be an external motivator (social pressure is crushed by the desire for TV or videogames) that keeps them from it. I think in the end, you’ll have to figure out what it is that makes video games seem like “just a game” in a mature adult, and try to grow up those same mental features in your child. And this one is even more complicated than the one for not being whiny.
December 6th, 2005 at 12:26
I would take issue with a number of points you have made.
Firstly, all behavior or beliefs are not made equal. If a child’s views are ‘respected’ as are a parents beliefs, then the child gets an incorrect view of the worth of their ideas. No need to develop actually good ideas when childish views garner all the respect you will get anyway! I don’t mean by this that a child shouldn’t be shown love and affection but this doesn’t imply that their childish views merit respect defacto. If childish ideas are given time and effort (by the child) then some encouragement is in order but often praise is given for no great effort and this leads the child to an entitlement viewpoint that is very counterproductive. Respect should be earned regardless of the age of the person and it only has value if that respect doesn’t come easily. An analogy to this is if your parents give you an allowance or you have to work at a real job for your money. The money is treated in two very different ways even though on the face of it, it is identical.
Secondly, I child has no right to be rude or show anger toward an adult. If respect is given to a child’s ‘right’ to get angry, then anger will be a much bigger part of them when they get older. Anger IMO is never a constructive emotion. It normally shuts down the rational thinking of even smart people and results in things being said that the person wishes they hadn’t said. Anger also stops the person receiving the emotion from listening to anything the angry person is saying. Learning to control one’s temper is an ability that needs to be learned at the earliest of ages. (No age is too young for a child to be forced, if necessary, to control their temper.) Anger is also useless in adults but unlike a child, the adult doesn’t have a parent around to help them stop this destructive emotion. For the adult, they either have to look after this problem themselves or very diplomatically from their significant other. The best thing to do is to make sure that kids never become adults without a firm control on their anger.
I agree that parents don’t try to understand the view of games or other things from their child’s point of view. They seem to forget what it was like to be a particular age themselves. If parents actively tried to learn the priorities and views of their children, then maybe they could help them better to balance their time among the things that would match their desires and what is healthy for them. I think advice from a parent to a child should be through the priorities and likes of the child, not the adult just giving what they would do in the same circumstance.
I am a great believer in manners and respectful behavior. (Not the same as having respect for someone’s ideas.) Adults are deserving of respectful behavior from children and teens just by the fact that they are adults. If this wasn’t the case then you would have kids trying to decide through their immature brains which adults deserved respect and which ones didn’t, with disastrous results. Manners and respectful behavior never hurt the person who uses them so there is no price to be paid for erring on the respectful side toward some adults who actually might not deserve that respect.