Is Twelve Hours of Video Games Too Much?

Parents have a variety of viewpoints on the appropriateness of video games for their children. Some parents are totally against gaming, while others think it’s ok for kids to spend every free moment each day glued to their console. And most parents fall somewhere in between these extremes. Accordingto a Big Fish Games article, almost 60% of Americans play video games.

For most of us, who think that our kids should be allowed to play video games at times but want to control their gaming and keep it limited to appropriate times and appropriate durations, there are tools built into modern gaming consoles that allow us to see when the system was played, what games were in use, and how long they were active.

This capability has been common since the Nintendo Wii was introduced in November of 2006, and it offers a glimpse into game play that can be both interesting and revealing. When you tell your ten-year-old he’s been playing for the past four hours and needs to stop, his first response is normally that it hasn’t been nearly that long. It’s always interesting to see the reaction when you can click into the game systems stats and prove it to them that they’ve just wasted three hours and forty five minutes of a beautiful Sinday afternoon helping Spongebob Squarepants find crabby patty spatulas hidden throughout Bikini Bottom.

And that’s an interesting and positive aspect of modern gaming systems. They have been engineered to minimize parental resistance. The smart people at Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo have realized that parents approve and make every kid’s purchase of their systems, so they’ve built in protections that help parents say yes and reduce the reasons they would be inclined to say no.

So protections are built into these gaming consoles, and there’s another aspect that makes it easy to control game system time; location. They call it a PlayStation because it provides a “station” where you have to go to play it. Since it’s impossible to play it unless you’re in a room with the system and a screen, it’s normally easier for a parent to know about how much gaming is going on without too much effort to keep track.

Now compare that to another outlet where kids are doing lots of gaming; their mobile devices. Androids and iPhones can download and run thousands of gaming titles from a dedicated Play Store and App store they can access. Some games require purchase, but many are free to download or “Fremium” (Meaning free to play at certain levels with purchases available to buy upgrades or in game currencies). So it is no problem for a minor to load games onto their mobile devices and play them all the time. Indeed, mobile gaming is considered one of the core functions of tablets like the iPad due to their larger screens and superior graphics.

And since they are essentially small, hand-held computers, most mobile devices aren’t set up with control and monitoring capabilities like the X-Box or Playstation. But as a parent, you can get them and load them onto your child’s phone, so you can monitor their app-based gaming and ensure that it remains at healthy levels.

A cell phone monitoringsoftware like Easy Spy is highly-capable monitoring tool that can tell you what apps your child has loaded onto their mobile devices and how much they are playing them. They also can monitor websites visited, pictures taken, texts sent and received, and a whole range of activities your child performs with a mobile device.