When did gaming become the thing I worried about?

Over the years, I have watched Cyrus become completely absorbed in a game. You call his name and get nothing. You ask him to come off and the child who was perfectly content thirty seconds earlier is negotiating for five more minutes.

My instinct has often been to reach for the obvious solution: limits. We have used parental controls. We have restricted gaming time and we have tried to make sure screens don’t swallow everything else he enjoys doing. It all sounds terribly organised when I write it down, but the reality has involved a lot more negotiation.

Parents are surrounded by warnings about children and screens. It is very easy to move from I don’t like how long he’s been on that to this must be bad for him without stopping to examine what is happening.

Screen time can make different activities sound identical

Gaming gets drawn into conversations about sleep, physical activity, behaviour, schoolwork and children’s relationships with the world beyond their devices. It is very easy to move from I don’t like how long he’s been on that to this must be bad for him without stopping to examine what is happening.

“Screen time” is also a broad term. Watching endless short videos isn’t necessarily the same activity as building something in Minecraft, playing a game with friends or using an educational app. Even the phrase screen time can make different activities sound identical.

The bit we could see

What mattered more in our house was what happened when the screen was switched off. Sometimes Cyrus didn’t want to stop playing and there could be bargaining and frustration, especially if we appeared at what he considered a crucial point in a game and announced that his time was up.

That was the behaviour I could see, but what I couldn’t was that gaming was harming him just because he occasionally objected to stopping. Children object to stopping lots of things they enjoy and I have never worried that Cyrus might have developed a dangerous dependency on swimming because he didn’t want to get out of the pool. But gaming somehow feels different.

So we introduced limits

Parental controls gave us something concrete: the machine could become the bad guy. Instead of H or me repeatedly announcing that enough was enough, we could set boundaries around gaming and make them part of the routine.

The aim wasn’t to make Cyrus “earn” every minute in front of a screen or to construct an elaborate exchange rate in which sixty minutes of gaming required thirty minutes of fresh air. It was to stop one thing taking over everything else, because there were plenty of other things competing for his attention: swimming, activities, family weekends and whatever else happened to have caught his interest that week.

Then I had to look at my own screen

This is the inconvenient part of almost every parental rule involving technology: adults are terrible advertisements for it. I can tell Cyrus to put a screen down while holding my phone. H can check something online while we’re discussing how much time Cyrus has spent online. Work, messages, photographs, maps, banking, news and approximately seventeen things I suddenly need to Google all live on the same device.

From Cyrus’s perspective, therefore, the household rule could look suspiciously like this: children should not spend too much time staring at screens; adults may stare at them whenever they have something important to stare at. Unfortunately, adults get to define important.

The online world is a different question

There is another distinction I’ve become more conscious of as Cyrus has grown: how long he spends gaming and what happens while he is gaming are not the same question. A child playing a game alone raises different considerations from one interacting with other people online.

That means a timer can’t be the complete solution. I also want to know what Cyrus is playing, who he is playing with, whether anything has bothered him and whether the game is still one part of his life rather than becoming the only part he wants. Those questions tell me more than the number on a screen-time counter.

The thing I understand differently

I used to think good screen-time parenting probably involved finding the correct number of minutes and enforcing it. I’m less convinced there is a magic number.

What seems more useful is looking at what the screen is displacing. Is Cyrus sleeping properly? Is he moving? Is he doing his schoolwork? Is he seeing people? Does he still want to swim, go out, do things with us and engage with the world beyond whatever game currently has his attention? And can he eventually put the device down, even if he grumbles about it?

I’m not trying to defeat screen time

I still use limits, but I think boundaries around gaming are useful because a child absorbed in a game is unlikely to announce voluntarily that he has enjoyed precisely the optimum amount of entertainment and will now go and do something else. I no longer think the objective is to defeat screen time.

Technology is part of Cyrus’s childhood in a way it wasn’t part of mine and trying to recreate a pre-digital childhood for him would be rather like my parents insisting I abandon the ZX Spectrum because they managed perfectly well without one.

My job is not to pretend the digital world isn’t there. It is to help him learn when to enter it, what to do while he’s there and, most importantly, when to come back out.

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Occasional stories, experiments, discoveries and questions from Saffron & Cyrus.