The truth is in the details

A few days ago I encountered a family with an 11-year-old child who had a handheld gaming console. Up to that point, everything was normal.

The child was playing while we waited for our food at the restaurant. One could debate whether the child should play to avoid boredom while waiting or should instead get bored and learn to wait or manage his boredom… but let’s not kid ourselves, it is increasingly common to see children in restaurants playing on phones/tablets…

What I don’t know is how children used to manage in restaurants… perhaps they no longer went because they would get bored and ruin things, and now parents can go to a restaurant… I go to restaurants (the kind I can enjoy with my children… I know I have children) without devices and most of the time the children know how to wait and nothing disastrous happens. That said, if you give each one a device, you might end up chatting with your partner as if you didn’t have children… as if you didn’t have children… as if you didn’t have children…

But what I want to address is another topic that made me reflect and that also happened with my children.

The child had parental control installed on his handheld console. After a set period, the console would lock and the child could no longer play. If he behaved well, his parents would increase his time. They could define the type of game, the hours, the days, the hours per day… everything could be controlled.

To me, delegating the control of the device to software that manages its usage does not seem the most educational approach.

A parent must educate his child to use the device responsibly. Surely you will end up arguing with your child, having friction and conflict points, but the alternative—avoiding conflict by letting a machine manage it—is a renunciation of responsibility.

However, there is something even more important, in my opinion.

One of the most important tasks of parents is to help their children mature, grow up, be responsible, develop self-control, and learn to set their own limits...

Therefore, parental control prevents a child from having the opportunity to mature his self-control, to test his limits so that we can correct him, to find points of conflict between parents and children and see if the child is capable of improving his self-control or not. We lose information on how our child matures by managing his impulses… let’s not kid ourselves, 90% of children, if given the choice, would want to be with devices for 8 hours… we have to help them manage it… and let them understand that one day they may exceed reasonable hours, but that would be an exception.

In our lives we also make exceptions from time to time… one day we go to a more expensive restaurant, one day we travel, one day we spend too many hours watching a series, one day we overindulge in chocolate… it is not a problem if we are responsible enough to manage it and then return to a responsible situation afterward.

In summary, I believe that parental control of video games (in terms of playtime) is a renunciation on the part of parents and a missed opportunity for a child to mature and learn to self-regulate his impulses...

I always tell my children that they can play on consoles as much as they want as a fun activity, a way to pass the time, but what they must always demonstrate is that they control the device… if I detect that it is the device that controls them (if they do not know when to stop), then I will act as a monitor to reduce its use to a minimum or even to zero for a few days. After those days, they will have the opportunity to prove to me again that they are in control… obviously, it is not always easy… but well, many adults are incapable of controlling their impulses so we cannot expect children from the start to do so without a consistent effort from the parents…

This is my opinion… perhaps a mistaken one…