<p>I need help…our son, 15, is home from boarding school for the summer. I will start by saying he is a great kid: bright, strong student, happy, non drinker, athletic, fun to be around, honest, never in trouble, etc. During the day, he plays golf, tennis, and at night, movies or board games with the family, very social in the family, etc. He chooses not to go out most nights because he “doesn’t want to go to parties where everyone is drinking”. Good choices, right? Well the problem is…he is absolutely addicted to xbox. There is a balance in that he does not play until we are all done with the days/evenings events, so he starts around 10. But he has been up every night until 2:30 AM playing for the two weeks he has been home. His dad and I are at a loss: do we take it away completely? He doesn’t play at boarding school so he is completely enamored with it during the summer. He is not working this summer because he is going on an outward bound trip next week for 2 weeks, then home for one month and then we will travel as a family. This means he has been sleeping until 11:30 every day. Something has to change here and I am officially sleepless over this. He has summer reading, could be doing prep for the PSAT, and so many other more worthwhile things (not his perspective…) Parents, I would love your advice.</p>
<p>My 15 year old son is similar but less social than yours. He finished school last week and now is playing xbox up to 10 hours at a shot. He starts his job in one week so I don’t worry too much right now but did put a 1 AM limit on his nighttime playing. My husband and I disagree about “how much is too much” and, I have ceded this battle. It is really too early to start his summer reading/school work (since he would never remember the details for the tests if done now). My son plays xbox online with many of his friends so at least it is social. He is very slim and athletic, so we don’t worry about him being temporarily sedentary. He had straight A’s in all honors classes this freshman year of high school, doesn’t do drugs, smoke or misbehave. We are cutting him slack. As I said, our only bone of contention (between H and I and S) is how much is too much. Your son’s time on Xbox sounds very tame and normal to me. My son played from 2:30 pm until 1 AM yesterday!!!</p>
<p>investor: I sympathize with your plight. My sons spend far more time on Xbox than I like, and they are not nearly as socially integrated into the family as your son. Honestly though, I agree with the seiclan…his time on Xbox appears to be rather tame. My only objection would be the 11:30AM wake up schedule; however, with all the other positive behaviours you mention, this is a good trade off.</p>
<p>I don’t believe it is good for a kid to always be doing serious stuff. Since he attends boarding school also, he probably has had very little unscripted time. I would totally let him hang out as he is doing. He sounds like a wonderful kid.</p>
<p>My youngest son loves his video games, but it has finally caught up with him. He just went to the eye doctor. His vision is twice as bad as it was 18 months ago, and if he does not curtail the gaming, our doctor will put him in bifocals – and he’s just 12. That scares him. So he is following the doctor’s orders and playing just 20 minutes here and there. Whatever I said did not make a difference. It took an eye doctor’s visit to do it.</p>
<p>He sounds, as you said, like a great kid. I don’t see any sense in taking his Xbox away.</p>
<p>Is the problem that he is sleeping in until 11:30? If that’s the issue, perhaps you should discuss different timing options with him - for instance, he could play for two hours during the day and two at night, instead of four and a half at night. I admit, I’m a bit surprised that, despite his lack of a job, his days are so full that he has no time to play until 10pm.</p>
<p>If the problem is that he’s not getting necessary things like summer reading done, you could require that he spend an hour a day, or something like that, on academic stuff, and then, as long as he does that, let him play the Xbox.</p>
<p>To be honest, four and a half hours a day during a vacation, when he doesn’t get to play during the school year, sounds…devoted, certainly, but not terribly excessive. It sounds like he’s still maintaining the other aspects of his life just fine, still doing things with his family.</p>
<p>I know I am a Pollyanna…but we don’t have one in the house period. I don’t agree that four hours is normal or healthy a day even as a “reward” in summer. There are so many opportunities to use one’s mind and body and to do volunteer work that requires you to get dressed and out the door by at least 10am daily.</p>
<p>A house without video games is a house with a teen who will at least be reading online and doing his reading assignements. </p>
<p>There is a Nintendo 64 game or two and system from a decade ago in the basement that gets a little attention now and then when they want to return to being 10 year olds for an hour…sons are 18 and 22 now. I decided it was OK not to provide a cozy video basement retreat for our sons and guests (although there was a brief time I considered setting that up in a belief that it would provide a place to have friends come over and might be my duty as a parent) </p>
<p>and after they got to the age of about 16…they both admitted they were better off not being the most popular re video games…since some other kids just spent way too much time on them and started missing out on what you really need to do to get ready for college. My 18 yr old just won a full tuition scholarship to a great college.</p>
<p>Sons instead mastered musical instruments, both classical and more fun/casual and played medium quality sports year round…they are not savant musicians or great athletes. But at age 15, summers included academic programs, music camps, and swim teams in relaxed outdoor clubs…and before we knew it they completely were bored with video culture and avoided students at college who sunk hours of time into these games. Walk down any male dorm hall in college, and you will find video game addicts who never sleep and choose to play obsessively over any other social activity…</p>
<p>and you will also find students who ignore them and feel sorry for them since they are wasting so much time and missing so much.
None of my son’s friends at Duke spent time on video games because they played intermural sports, were in symphony, writers…or did other local service projects plus simply socializing on the halls takes up tons of time in the old style face to face social life plus new style social life with blackberries, I-phones and texting 24/7…which robs them all of a couple hours a day in this new age…
Students at college who ignore the video gameaholics are still completely using up time and hours daily on electronic communications…and not getting the amt of sleep that they require.</p>
<p>My advice is to be more proactive as a parent and to put some arbitrary limit on X box daily for 15 year old-- and next summer to have them too busy to have to be bossy about it again.<br>
My experience as a parent of a student that is averse to video games and is super social, active and musical and sporty…is that even my son fell down the black hole of getting no sleep freshman year, came home with mono and had to relearn how to get 7 hours of sleep and three meals a day in order to perform academically.
Why is even a non video gamer at risk?
Do not underestimate the hypnotic effects of Facebook, I-phones, blackberries on your son when he is an older teen and college student…and kiss a couple hours a day goodbye on cybersocializing no matter who your son or daughter is…son’s hall mates also had video cams to chat at night face to face with high school sweethearts etc…plus Twitter and Skype…god knows what will be there when your boy is 18…</p>
<p>with that reality in mind, my view is video games have to go to the dust bin and are to be avoided like the plague…as last resort of how to use up a little R and R free time.</p>
<p>I do not think TVs and video games should ever be provided in a bedroom…which should be set up in my opinion as a study retreat for the very difficult last years of high school. My sons got up at 6:30am daily in HS to do their Extracurriculars and then homework and activities pretty much ate up till midnight daily. Lots of homework. By age 15, you son should do a practice PSAT at home and begin to get a glimpse of soph and junior year rigor in AP exams and SATII exams that are just around the corner and require cumulative learning.
I do not bother my sons by lecturing about it or forbidding them to play video games when they are at friend’s homes or in college dorms nor am I going to spout my anti video outlook here since frankly I am also wishy washy on the subject. We live in an age that is baffling and unlike our upbringing…and my sons are part of it…they spend probably an hour daily each online on fave websites…one researches classical music obsessively…the other film, they read the newspapers online and go to other more stupid entertainment sites…all things they would not do if there was a video system in the house…both write well and I hate to give credit to the internet but they read critical writing online a lot.</p>
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<p>I tend to agree. Did I read this here or somewhere else?:
One way to evaluate whether video games are taking up too much time is to pretend the time is spent on video games was spent “being a Cubs fan.” Suppose that every hour spent playing video games were being spent, instead, watching Cubs games, reading books about the Cubs, studying and memorizing Cubs statistics, buying Cubs memorabilia. Would the kid be thought to be “a true fan,” more devoted than most but not having some sort of a problem, or would this level of devotion be considered to be a problem? </p>
<p>To me, this kid is at the “true fan” level. This much play during the school year would be a problem, but during the summer? It certainly is time that could be spent more productively - and if he were my kid I would wish he would play less - but kids don’t need to be productive 16 hours a day…</p>
<p>And yes, I also have a 15 year old son who likes his xbox…</p>
<p>Thanks for all the good advice and input. I think we will have a discussion and define the number of hours he can play and get to bed by 1:00 AM, which seems reasonable to us for a rising junior in high school. Interestingly, he never plays during the day. Right now he is out hiking with a friend, but I did have to push a bit to get him to go. We live in the mountains during summer, so hiking is big time here. We talked to him earlier and got the “everybody in online all the time” and we told him that GAMERS were not to be his role model…as you can see, the conversation did not go well! We’ll regroup and try again later. I do hate this thing and wish we had never bought it. I worry more about the future potential for addiction…he plays halo…and the violence, which is against our nature totally…but I will keep you all posted and thank you again for the input.</p>
<p>I thought this would be another one of those threads where the kid is seriously consumed by the game but happily your S isn’t. It seems that he has a very good balance since he’s involved in many outside activities, activities with the family, physical activity, etc. I don’t see any problem with his playing the game other than how late he’s staying up to play it but you can take care of this by limiting the timeframe he’s allowed to use it.</p>
<p>It sounds like you have a very balanced kid and I think you should not worry - be happy with him (as I’m sure you are).</p>
<p>He sounds like a great kid. I would not have a problem with his staying up till 2.30 and waking at 11.30 on vacation; especially if, as your son is, they were active and participating in everything else with family and friends the rest of the time.</p>
<p>Another vote for “this is not excessive”, although I’m sure we’d all like it if our kids made the same choices Faline’s did. I will say we don’t have it in the bedroom, and we shut it down around 11. ( He usually reads when he is “unplugged”, and seems to really enjoy it. Duh.) Neither of these are accepted without protest though, and all nighters are always at someone else house. My son is 16, spends a lot of time on sports, is putting in moderate effort at school, and would ALWAYS rather socialize if the opportunity is there. With regard to Xbox, if he is on Xbox live, it may be the kids he enjoys playing with all come on what for you is late night. Maybe they are kids in California?</p>
<p>I totally agree with the great kid/vacation time/not excessive playing time etc views already posted here. My only restriction would possibly be that he should be up by 10 am, but then again, the kid’s on vacation, so why?! We always restricted our boys during the school year to no XBox during the week at all - they could play from after school Friday til Sunday @ 5 pm. As long as they did their usual chores and homework in that time, they could stay up as late and sleep as late as they wanted. Worked for us.</p>
<p>I’m with Zimmer07 on this. For our 15 year old son, we have a no X-Box or TV rule in our house from Sunday at 4 PM to Friday after school. These are days meant for school work and extra-curriculars. The only exception granted was for 24 on Monday nights, his favorite show. As long as grades stay decent (honor roll) and he does his assigned chores, he can stay up as late as he wants on weekends. Seems to be working so far.</p>
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<p>The idea that playing video games precludes you from doing anything else in life is false. Pretty much everyone I knew at MIT played video games, many of them quite a lot, and they were athletes, researchers, community service jocks, activists, club officers, writers, and so on. Nearly all had active social lives, and most were voracious readers. The ones who have graduated are productive members of society, still involved in sports and community, and mostly still avid video game players. In a lot of cases, their interest in creative writing or computer programming was spurred by their love of video games.</p>
<p>The idea that being a video gamer means wasting your life, that being a video gamer is a sign of dysfunction or that NOT being a video gamer is a sign of a good, healthy kid, needs to die and never return. That is not to say that there are no dysfunctional video game players, nor that there’s no such thing as excess - if you are playing video games (or doing any activity, like reading for example) 12 hours/day, you’re clearly not leaving room in your life for much else - but I’m really sick of the stereotype. It doesn’t jibe at all with the reality that I’ve seen, unfairly casts a stigma on lots of productive and active people, and causes parents to view a simple hobby (and one that can be beneficial, at that) with suspicion.</p>
<p>It can be relaxing as well.</p>
<p>I’ve played video games (first-person shooters)! As long as it isn’t done to excess and exclusion then IMO it’s fine to do just like many other activities/pastimes, like watching TV, hitting tennis balls, playing chess, knitting, reading for pleasure, playing golf, surfing/posting on CC!, etc. The operative words are ‘excess’ and ‘exclusion’. The OP’s S definitely isn’t doing this to exclusion and probably not to excess either although the late hours could stand to be shifted according to the OP. He’s on break from school, heavily involved in physical and social activities, and seems to be an all-around well-adjusted kid so I don’t think a heavy hand should be used here - maybe just some gentle adjustment of the timeframes.</p>
<p>There have been some posters here post regarding their sons who had real issues with gaming and who needed serious help but this kid is nothing like those cases.</p>