Locked in their bedrooms, playing video games into the small hours, children as young as 10 years old are now addicted to their consoles. Tim Lewis hears how the compulsive games can be impossible to resist – and meets the experts tackling the issue
I refuse to use parental controls, because I know my kids will find a way around it (I would). I instead set firm rules with relatively severe consequences if they’re not followed. Once I login to the PC, there’s no time limit, content filters, etc.
That said, my youngest kept getting into the Switch and messing up peoples’ saves, so I put a parental lock on it, but I told my older kids the code and told them I trust them with it. If they abuse their time with it, they lose the console privilege.
It seems to be working. I’ll probably give them a PC soon since they’re doing a decent job stopping when their timer goes off (they set the timer according to our rules). We have limits (2hr max per day, must be done with homework, they earn time by reading), but again, I don’t enforce them with software, I enforce them with the threat of loss of privileges.
I think that’s great! There’s no thing that works universally. My suggestion for parental controls was more, hey this is the ambare minimum, it’s 5 minutes of setting it up, just so it rather than blaming games.
Every console and PC has parental controls that limit screen time. It’s 100% on parents if they don’t set it up.
Or, do what my mom did and take it away. I hated her for it, but I admit 20 years later that that was called parenting.
I refuse to use parental controls, because I know my kids will find a way around it (I would). I instead set firm rules with relatively severe consequences if they’re not followed. Once I login to the PC, there’s no time limit, content filters, etc.
That said, my youngest kept getting into the Switch and messing up peoples’ saves, so I put a parental lock on it, but I told my older kids the code and told them I trust them with it. If they abuse their time with it, they lose the console privilege.
It seems to be working. I’ll probably give them a PC soon since they’re doing a decent job stopping when their timer goes off (they set the timer according to our rules). We have limits (2hr max per day, must be done with homework, they earn time by reading), but again, I don’t enforce them with software, I enforce them with the threat of loss of privileges.
I think that’s great! There’s no thing that works universally. My suggestion for parental controls was more, hey this is the ambare minimum, it’s 5 minutes of setting it up, just so it rather than blaming games.