Video Gaming and Family Conflict

[Dr. Ed Spector]: One of the first steps in any sort of parental situation is to, before you get into the power struggle, to really understand what’s going on. So you start with curiosity and questions, right? So it’s okay, how come every night when it’s time for dinner, we say it’s time for dinner and you don’t get off and you get real salty and problematic and, you know, it kind of explodes. What’s going on? What game are you playing? Because oftentimes the game that they’re playing, the situation that they’re in, like parents don’t understand that some of these games are really hard to stop in a in a like a short timeframe. It may be that this kid is actually struggling with how to navigate a social situation irrespective of gaming. Like you wouldn’t come in in the middle of a basketball game and just grab the kid and be like, hey, guys, the game’s over. First is to understand, are they having a hard time because of maybe executive functioning skills or just they’re just not planning it out well or social pressure? And so often what we’ll do is we’ll back up and say, okay, if dinner’s always at seven, then what’s the latest point at which you can enter a match and have it be realistically over by dinnertime? Once you start doing that, they can really pull away and some games are better for doing this than others. So I’ve had a lot of success with family conflict where we simply shift to different games. Games that are easy to just jump off of right when we get to a transition point. So that’s an example.