Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Taming the video game addiction

I've been dragged, kicking & screaming, into letting our DS8 play those evil web-based computer games. My son, has a handful of good friends who like to play, and after some pestering (& review), we decided to let him play, too.

But then the little addict became unbearable... he wanted his fix & I wanted his homework done. If the gaming were held carrot-like until after homework, the quality suffered. Problem after problem... I was going nuts.

So here's my incredible blast of genius (I didn't check to see if others have done it -- I wanted to bask in the presumed glory instead!)...

If he gets up, gets dressed, makes his bed, cleans up his room, takes out his laundry, he may play until it is time for breakfast. He may not get up any earlier than 6am and he MUST wake me up no later than 6:30am. He's then free to continue playing until I ring the bell for breakfast, which is usually another 15 minutes or so.

This has worked so well for us... it's truly amazing. We've done it now for a few weeks and he's been up & on time every single day. He gets his fix and the house is in motion & out the door each morning without any rushing or flaring tempers.

Just wanted to share!

We suffer from the addiction too (at least my kids do). I hate it. Usually it goes in waves--they play play play, then don't play for months. Keeping them otherwise engaged and doing all their required tasks before playing is the only way it's controlled here. I still don't approve of the enormous time spent with a machine...but here I am on the computer (he he he)

I don't allow my son to play computer games during the weekdays. He's allowed to play it 30 minutes on Saturdays and Sundays but he rarely plays since we are mostly busy with activities.
He seems to enclined to play it more whenever he has a play date with other boys at their houses and mainly spends time playing the computer games. So I pretty much stopped play dates with those kids at their houses. He does have play dates at a park instead.

I heard some stories about severe game addictions from my Korean relatives. My cousin even sent her son to a summer camp in Britain just to make her son get away from the computer. Their advice is to limit the time in front of the computer and help them to enjoy other things in life. I know it's easier said than done.

DS7 was totally addicted to video games. Originally he was allowed to play for about 20 minutes on a school day. Then we cut it back to weekends only. Cut it again to just Saturdays because he was having such a difficult time transitioning to school on Mondays after playing for hours on Sunday. Finally we took them away completely. It really had become an addiction. When he wasn't playing them he was strategizing on how to beat certain levels. In school that's all he'd write about during journal time and in his free time he'd draw pictures of the characters. I have to say he has become a lot more focused and "with it" since we took them away. Definitely hard though because his father had been in the game industry for 10 years. I think it's in his genes lol!