My Kid is Addicted to Video Games – What do I do?

How to turn the household battle into an alliance for change

Parents were not prepared for parenting in the digital age.

Up until the last 20 years, kids didn’t have a ton of options. They could stay inside with Mom and Dad or go out and play with friends. They could help Mom make dinner or go to soccer practice. Stay at home and stare at the wall or go on the family trip. But not anymore.

Now, there’s something far more engaging.

If you’re a parent reading this, you already know what I’m talking about. Gradually, your kid has become more and more hooked on some form of technology. Despite your best efforts to keep their grades up, maintain participation in extracurriculars (sometimes via screaming match), and spend adequate time with family and friends – you’re losing the fight.

And it’s terrifying.

I’m here to tell you a few things – this isn’t happening because of a parenting failure, or because your kid has some incurable addictive genetics. The real issue is that technology has evolved way too fast, leaving parents with an outdated script on how to handle this problem.

What Actually Causes Addiction to Video Games?

For a much more in depth understanding of what games and technology does to our mind and the root of why it is so addicting, I recommend pausing here and checking out my article titled: “Conquering Video Game Addiction”. To keep this blog post relevant for parenting, I’ll summarize the major points here:

• Technology reduces blood flow to our brain’s negative emotional circuitry, helping us avoid and suppress uncomfortable emotional states
• Technology and games are designed to partially satisfy our human desire for achievement, progress, socialization, and creativity, becoming increasingly attractive if we are struggling in one or multiple of these areas
• Kids who are struggling with excessive video game use while sacrificing other life priorities are almost always in some form of emotional distress that they have no idea how to articulate, explain, or cope with.

Some examples of this may include:

• Bullying, or cyberbullying, often unknown to the parents
• Social Anxiety, especially as children enter adolescence
• ADHD, Mild Autism, or some other neurodivergent disorder, diagnosed or undiagnosed, making daily life difficult for kids
• Insecurity or Low Self-Esteem due to difficulty in school
• High Performing Students who previously did not need to exert much effort for good grades, who now lack study skills and interpret their educational difficulties as intellectual failure: “Gifted Kid Syndrome”

Many parents who I work with are unaware of these problems at the outset. Part of this is due to how preteens and teenagers begin to differentiate from their parents – they want to find a sense of independence and find their own capacity to solve problems. Unfortunately, sometimes it’s too much stress to bear, and it can go unnoticed for a while. Especially if technology or games enter the mix – the discomfort can be just quiet enough to stay out of conversations during family dinner.

As you may have already discovered, exerting complete control and strict rules only seems to exacerbate the problem. Your kid finds other ways around it, and it has likely created a war zone in the house. And from a practical standpoint, you fear what their life will look like once they grow up.

Therefore, we are left with only one realistic option – helping them to form a healthy relationship with technology that they want for themselves, and that they have the motivation to implement.

Building a healthy relationship with technology first involves understanding the underlying problem that technology is currently solving for your child. This strategy of alliance building has helped thousands of families transform their child’s relationship with gaming – and improve trust, depth, and enjoyment between everyone in the house.

How do I get my kid off of those dang screens?!

This is an abridged, summarized version of the parenting strategy outlined by psychiatrist Dr. Alok Kanojia in his book: “How to Raise a Healthy Gamer”. For more in-depth examples and explanations, I highly recommend accessing this book or his free resources at Youtube channel “HealthyGamerGG”.

1. Rebuilding an Alliance

As it stands, there is likely a combative relationship between you and your child, which only increases the likelihood that they will suppress their negative emotions with technology. This phase involves rebuilding an alliance with your kid by removing opposition. When done successfully, we see kids eventually start to bring their negative emotions to their parents, instead of to the screens.

What this looks like in practice varies from household to household, but the overarching goal of this phase is to form a team between you and your kid against the negative emotions they are experiencing, instead of against the games. As long as the fight is between you and the games, you will continue to lose over and over again. One of the hardest parts of this phase for parents is letting your kids experience the consequences of their own actions (within safe limits, of course).

2. Engaging Your Child in a New Boundary Plan

That initial phase can take months, and requires a lot of patience. Once trust has been rebuilt with your child, they will gradually start to bring emotional problems to you. They may be struggling with relationships at school, or feeling ashamed that their grades are so low (whatever it is, it’s what pushed them toward excessive gaming in the first place).

Regardless, once your child trusts that you’re not going to take away their way of coping, you can start to identify goals together. Your child may say that they want more friends, or they wish they had higher grades. Once trust is rebuilt, you can work together to create a boundary plan that they will actually cosign with you – in the spirit of reaching those goals.

During this phase, you also mutually agree on what punishments will take place if goals aren’t met. Not only does having your child on board increase their chances of success, but it also gives them a blueprint for how to operate when they leave the nest.

The boundary plan looks something like:

• Engaging your child with open ended questions
• Presenting a menu of options, milestones, and metrics based on a goal you have set
• Allow them to have input about boundary enforcement, while you define the boundary
• “I need you to have a 3.0GPA to keep gaming, but you can pick the times that you want to game the most”.
• Finalize the plan and ensure that you are able to enforce the boundaries that you have set
• Institute the plan, start weekly check-ins, and be open to pivoting if something does not work as intended

3. Enforcing New Boundaries and Dealing with Resistance

Pushback is to be expected. You are asking your child to change their relationship with something that has likely been protecting them from uncomfortable real-life situations. Remember that you are not working against your child – you and your child are working against their own distress. Your child wants more positive relationships and a well-rounded life – they just have no idea how to get there.

Resistance and denial are psychological defense mechanisms against negative emotion. Meeting denial with opposition only continues to fuel the fire – instead, validating the underlying emotion has a tendency to be far more disarming. This can look something like “I can understand that your friends are really important to you, and you really enjoy playing video games, and that as a fifteen-year-old, it is your job to have fun. I totally get that. At the same time, it’s also your job to be a student and learn. How do we reconcile those two things? How do we find some kind of balance?”

Moving forward with an attitude of curiosity and teamwork will completely dismantle resistance.

Ultimately, this is a condensed version of a plan that will have nuance for each specific family setting – some kids start with different levels of awareness about their gaming problem, which requires starting with a different approach. If these general tips feel difficult to implement, a therapist can help guide your family through it.

Know that you’re not alone, and this problem isn’t a symptom of ‘bad parenting’. Technology has evolved so quickly that old parenting strategies don’t hold up anymore, and few people have been able to adapt to the rapid changes. Complete abstinence from technology is unrealistic at this point, as it has become woven into almost every aspect of our lives. At this point, we are left with only one option: teaching our youth how to develop a healthy relationship with technology that they can rely on long after they leave the home – after all, technology is here to stay.