By Gavin Boyle
Supermodel Tyra Banks explained how she navigates her son’s use of video games, and it might just be the framework parents need to give their kids healthy access to the tech.
“I had a ‘no video games in my house’ rule. Then, my significant other, the stepfather of my child, he introduced Roblox and — what’s the video game with all the squares? Minecraft. And now my son is addicted,” Banks told TODAY WITH JENNA AND FRIENDS.
“So, I made a contract. You can only do these days, you can only do these hours, you have to earn it with chores, homework, blah, blah, blah, blah,” Banks added. “He signed it.”
Though Banks later shared it’s been difficult to actually enforce this system, it shows parents another option to letting their kids use tech without going overboard with restrictions. Limiting use to a set time every day, or only during the weekends, for example, allows children to feel like they are not missing out on the pastimes their peers enjoy, while also protecting them from many of the harmful side effects of unlimited video game access.
Experts, meanwhile, encourage parents to enable their children to engage in other hobbies and activities away from their screens. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt previously explained why play is so crucial for children as their brains develop.
“The brain is actually 90% of its full size by the time you’re 6 years old, so it’s not about growth beyond that. It’s about actually pruning out neurons that don’t get used and emphasizing and ultimately myelinating or sort of insulating the circuits that do get used; so play has to occur over a long period of time,” Haidt told Jordan B. Peterson when explaining why replacing play with tech is so detrimental.
Furthermore, parents could give their kids with video games that are more worthwhile, perhaps games that teach them life lessons or focus on positive, biblically rooted messages. TruPlay, for example, is a video game platform that releases products that teach players about biblical truths.
“I think as Christians we’ve done a lot of movies, we’ve done a lot of music, we have certainly done a lot of books, but given that games are so much a part of our cultural fabric, we’ve got to be right there with excellence,” TruPlay founder Brent Dusing told Movieguide®.
“You know, you’re on a screen 52 hours a week as a child in America, the average child’s at church 30 minutes…so it’s literally a 100 to one type of exposure…” Dusing added. “I think in our culture today, kids don’t have a lot of positive examples of where they can turn to for virtue, and so that’s what we love to try to do.”
Related: How Popular are Video Games Really?
While navigating how children use tech today is one of the most difficult parts of modern parenting, setting boundaries will keep kids safe and help them investigate other possible hobbies.
Read Next: Just How Susceptible Are Teens to Gaming Addiction?
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