What's So Wrong with Gaming?

The world has shifted in a much different way — and I grew up in a different one entirely. The first chapter of my own childhood was a small hamlet in Ontario, set on a lake, where summer meant swimming until our lips turned blue and catching bullfrogs along the water's edge. I still remember the summer my brother and I spent chasing one particular frog — a giant, impossible thing we were certain we could catch and somehow never did. And when we were not down at the water, we were cutting and stacking lumber for the fireplace, the kind of honest work that left you tired in the good way.

The next chapter was a small mining town tucked into the mountains of Alberta, with nothing but forest for hundreds of kilometers in every direction. We shared that country with bears, deer, and rabbits, and we treated every acre of it like our own backyard. We built forts in the trees, rode our bikes down hills that were, in hindsight, far too big for us, and hunted for snipes — that imaginary bird that always stayed just elusive enough to keep us looking all afternoon. My parents' biggest fear was that my brother and I might wander too deep into the wild and not find our way home before dark. That was the danger of my childhood: too much world, and not nearly enough fear of it.

Now the world seems a little different. Many kids, teens, and young adults have traded building forts in nature for player housing in Eorzea. We have stopped hunting for snipes and now hunt for goblins. We are no longer hunting bullfrogs; instead, we are hunting other players in a PvP — player versus player — environment.

It is a popular opinion among adults that we have strayed from a way of life — that we miss the good old days, when kids played outside until the street lights came on, or until Mom called us in for dinner. Video gaming, much like any new technology, has brought with it skepticism for our youth's future. Some of these concerns are real and need to be examined.

When your teen wakes up at 10 a.m., disappears into the basement, and doesn't emerge until 1 a.m., you start to wonder if there is a problem. You may also wonder about some of the odours coming from the basement. When your teen throws a temper tantrum because he can't play one more map, or because someone killed his digital self, you start to wonder how healthy this really is. And then there's the hardest part — this may be the only social life your teen has. Take it away, and you take away far more than just a game. Let's be honest: it is often easier not to fight.

Not long ago, I sat across from a mother whose son was only months away from leaving for college. He was up at all hours gaming, swearing through his headset at people she had never met, and he had all but stopped speaking to her. She was worn down to nothing. Partway through our conversation, she began to cry. She just wanted someone to tell her what to do.

And here is the thing — she was not a bad mother. She was a good one, at the very end of her rope. She had reasons for all of it, real ones; her son had been diagnosed with ADHD, and she could name every factor that had carried them to this point. She also knew, the way only a mother knows, that he was a bright kid — a boy with real potential who kept getting pulled back under by this world, again and again, and could not seem to climb out.

What struck me most was how long it had been going on. Years. So many years that the struggle had become part of the furniture of their home, and the thought of ever seeing it any other way felt impossible. They were stuck — not because they had stopped loving each other, but because they had simply run out of ways to show it.

And sitting there with her, it hit me just how big this issue has truly become. Because I knew where that boy was coming from — I had been him. I knew what he was reaching for in that game, and I knew what he had really needed back then, because it was the very thing I had needed too. My heart went out to those parents. They loved their son and would have done anything for him, and still no one had ever trained them for this.

That is the hard truth sitting at the center of this whole book: nobody trains parents for the world our kids are actually growing up in.

If even a piece of that sounds like your own home, then this next part is for you most of all.

So let me underline the first point right away: you, as a parent, are not broken. It was once said that there's no manual for being a parent. The problem now is that there are too many manuals. It's hard to know which one to follow, and the moment you think you've done something right, fifteen articles appear to tell you how you've failed. The reality is, you have failed. We have all failed. And that is parenting. We are not perfect, and to strive for perfection is to strive for constant anxiety, stress, and depression. You love your child — let that be your focal point throughout this conversation.

Parenting is hard in today's world. We are dealing with new realities that never existed before. Our parents had to worry about how violent the Looney Tunes were, and which kid in class was the troublemaker so we didn't hang around him. (I joke — parenting has always been hard.) Yet we have a whole new set of challenges.

Social media has taken over as the mirror through which our children view the world — teaching them to compare themselves to people who only ever show their best moments. They have to deal with virtual bullying, an opponent they cannot face. Our children have access to nearly all the information in the world at their fingertips — both true and false. They learn something in school, google it, and find a competing theory. They have the ability to discredit almost everything being taught to them.

Instagram, with its filters, has created an unrealistic world none of us can live up to. Whether it's the girl in the perfect outfit looking like a model, or the guy in the amazing car with the ear-to-ear smile, we already carry a quiet feeling that something is wrong with us — and now we hold tools that reinforce our inadequacies every single day.

They have pornography at their fingertips — unlimited, instant, and free, at the exact age when their brains are least equipped to handle it. Where a young person once had to fumble their way toward understanding intimacy slowly, through awkward and very human experience, now they are handed a counterfeit version of it before they have ever held someone's hand. It rewires what they expect a partner and a relationship to be, and it quietly teaches them that desire is something to be satisfied on demand rather than something to be stewarded. We are asking our kids to build healthy relationships on a foundation that has already been poured crooked — and then wondering why so many of them struggle to connect at all.

And we have not even gotten to artificial intelligence yet. We are now raising children alongside programs that will talk, listen, and soon look entirely real — companions engineered to agree with them, affirm them, and cater to their every desire, without ever once pushing back. Think about what that does to a kid who is already struggling with the friction of real people. A real friend disagrees with you. A real friend has bad days, needs things from you, calls you out when you are wrong. An AI never has to. It offers all the warmth of connection with none of the cost — and for a generation already learning that the easy version of everything is one tap away, that is a quietly enormous thing. We will come back to this, because it is only going to grow.

Our youth are living in a world where self-control and self-management are becoming a thing of the past — at a stage of development where regulating that behaviour is already hard, and they are still learning how. It's a bit like putting an alcoholic in a room for eight years, with butlers and servers ready to bring any drink they desire, and then expecting them to walk out sober.

As parents, our position doesn't make it easier. We are imperfect people placed in a situation where our imperfection gets criticized. There's always another article saying what we're doing is wrong; then we do the opposite, and that's wrong too.

Mothers are surrounded by endless advice and told that their own support systems — their parents — did it wrong, leaving them stranded on an island by themselves. Mothers are told their children are delicate eggs that could crack at any moment — that there is a world of predators out there, and they must keep twenty-four-hour watch. And to make it worse, they're often told that if their child is sad, it is their fault.

Fathers, meanwhile, are pretty much treated as sperm donors and ATMs in today's world. We're taught more and more that the mother is the primary caregiver — which has slid into the idea that fathers simply follow the mother's orders. If she says no sleep training, you don't sleep train. If she says no ice cream, then it's no ice cream. As a result, fathers are too often pushed to the margins of their own children's lives. Men who are natural protectors get treated like a problem to be managed — quietly replaced by self-help books and the newest parenting podcast. It isn't that dads are doing less; most are doing more than their own fathers ever did. It's that we've been told our instincts can't be trusted.

This leaves parents feeling very lost and very lonely. And divorce has actually fallen since its peak in 1980 — but don't let that fool you. Fewer people marry at all now, and the cohabiting homes that replaced marriage break apart far more often. So fewer kids than ever are growing up with both parents under one stable roof. The instability didn't disappear; it just moved. And with it, the ingredients for peaceful parenting are being lost.

None of this is meant to come from judgment, yet from empathy. You are not alone in this parenting world. We are all in the same place. None of us has it perfectly right. It is my hope that you feel some grace through these pages — that you forgive yourself, and understand that we are going to fail forward, together.

So we are going to explore this thing called gaming, and our children, together. Why is your son so drawn to the games? What are they fulfilling in his life? What is happening in his brain as it develops? What are the social impacts and the potential mental health concerns? And then the most important question of all: how can all of this be used for good — to actually help our children grow?