8 Tips for Raising Children Who Play Online Games

These days, many children and teenagers are engaged in online and offline games. Gaming is considered one of the common pastimes for children and teenagers. Even adults, when they have free time, use games for entertainment and to pass the time. Childhood and adolescence are recognized as sensitive and critical age groups for growth and development. During these stages, individuals gain various experiences, and significant mental growth occurs. However, online games may limit opportunities to interact with the real-world environment, and for some children, these opportunities are reduced to a minimum. Therefore, it is natural for you, as a concerned parent, to seek ways to raise children who are passionate about online games.

Below, we will discuss details regarding online games, how to raise children, and how to deal with teenagers interested in online gaming.

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What is the Concept of Online Gaming?

Using games that are played collectively or individually on an internet-based platform is referred to as online gaming. Online games are typically accessible through gaming consoles and computers. In some simpler types, smartphones can also be used for online gaming. Many people love online games because they allow competition with other users and are played on a designed platform. Sharing experiences, teamwork, and similar activities are all parts of online games that attract teenagers, young adults, and even children.

Learn More: A Guide to Parental Care for Children on the Internet Based on Age and Ensuring Their Safety

How Serious is the Impact of Online Games on Mental Health?

In this article, unlike many others, we aim to help you understand that online gaming is not always bad! Sometimes, it is a healthy and beneficial pastime for your child, provided they adhere to limits and boundaries to protect their privacy and themselves. This way, everything remains in perfect order. If online games are used without rules and considerations, they will undoubtedly disrupt daily tasks and activities. Over time, you will notice the individual drifting away from real-life environments. Reduced social and friendly interactions are also part of the issue. These undesirable effects have led many to view the impact of online games on children and teenagers’ mental health as negative! However, these issues stem from a lack of proper education on how to use these facilities. Your informed approach can create a safe environment for entertainment and the use of online games without any risks or problems. Using control through applications like Imino creates conditions for healthy upbringing in children. However, this matter has specific dimensions for teenagers that necessitate consulting with psychologists.

Impact of Online Games

As you know, various experiences in today’s world show that online games can be a double-edged sword, revealing their adverse effects with the slightest ignorance. The impact of online games on children’s mental health is entirely serious. Negative social experiences during gaming can cause harm to the mental well-being of children and teenagers. For example, if your child has upsetting interactions with other players on an online platform or receives negative messages about their identity, gaming can negatively affect their mental health and influence their social dimensions. After all, a real person sits behind the online game account or avatar. This can alter the safe and suitable home environment for the child. In such cases, no matter how much time you dedicate to meeting their needs, it is not enough, as the emotional harm comes from an area you hadn’t even considered! Therefore, you must be vigilant and guide the use of these spaces during childhood with safe supervision.

What is the Positive Impact of Online Games from the Audience’s Perspective?

As mentioned earlier, online games do not only have drawbacks! The advantages of online games are also numerous. A real survey and gathering of user opinions revealed that online games can sometimes be highly effective and beneficial. One gamer stated, “For me, gaming has become a special place where I can escape from my academic degree, life, and mental health conditions during tough times. Gaming has provided me with the opportunity to take necessary steps to treat depression and anxiety and observe its positive effects.” Another gamer said, “If gaming helps you stay away from stress and anger and implement all these mechanisms in a safe environment like a game, it is definitely worth considering having gaming as a daily pastime.”

These points highlight the positive effects of gaming on online platforms, provided moderation and principles are observed.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Online Games on the Health of Children and Teenagers

Awareness is always the best solution for raising children. Therefore, you must take verbal interaction seriously to raise their awareness. To start this crucial interaction, always begin with the word “I.” For example, you can say, “I’ve noticed you’re playing a lot more than usual lately, and I thought we could talk about it?” Starting the conversation during a shared activity can evoke more empathy. This way, your child can be assured that you take their identity seriously!

After this stage, you should discuss the serious risks they face. Explain the culture of using these facilities and establish proposed frameworks through mutual consultation. These actions will allow you to create a foundation for proper upbringing with peace of mind.

Impact of Online Games on Children’s Health in Childhood

• Improved Education and Growth: Online games designed for children’s age groups can significantly aid cognitive abilities. Through these online games, you can teach children various skills and scientific topics in an entertaining format.
• Positive and Negative Social Impacts: If online gaming is conducted with parental supervision and proper groundwork, it expands the child’s social interactions and strengthens teamwork. However, the negative effects of online games without sufficient education and supervision lead to reduced interaction with the environment and friends. Isolation and lack of socialization are consequences of this. Even educational begging games have been developed and are available on local platforms, easily polluting the pure minds of children.
• Mental Impacts: Playing online games, especially in cult-like, scary, or highly action-packed genres without time restrictions, increases stress and depression in children. Therefore, parental supervision and the use of parental control applications are recommended.
• Physical Health Impacts: Online games may reduce children’s physical activity. This results in constant entertainment that requires no movement and operates with simple buttons! This trend leads to obesity, various diseases, and disorders in children.
• Reduced Sleep Quality: Excessive use of online games or scary and terrifying games can reduce a child’s sleep duration, leading to learning difficulties, lack of focus, and aggression.
• Severe Addiction: Some online games, especially battle royales or story-based games, can create severe addiction in children! This leads to emotional harm and numerous conflicts with parents.
• Fear and Horror: Some games induce high levels of fear and tension in children, resulting in adverse effects on their mood. Nightmares and similar issues are consequences of violent and scary games. Remember that the seeds of violence and killing in some games are planted in children’s minds, and continuing this trend normalizes killing and harming others.
• Explicit Content: Sometimes, explicit content exists in the graphics, various game stages, or hidden areas. Therefore, games should be downloaded and used from verified sources. Another way to ensure suitable games is to pay attention to age ratings and game reviews.
• Tendency Toward Extremist Cults and Religions: Hidden investments behind some games stimulate children’s inclinations and mindsets toward extremist cults and religions. Therefore, game reviews should be studied, or the companies producing them should be investigated.
• Reduced Activity: Online games can lead to reduced activity in children. This can negatively impact their physical health.

Impact of Online Games on Teenagers’ Health

Online games have various impacts on the mental and physical health of teenagers. The positive effects of these games include developing social skills and improving brain performance in problem-solving! However, the style of using this space also matters. If gaming is not regulated and within a specific behavioral framework, you will undoubtedly experience undesirable effects. Violent behaviors, lack of social balance, and mental issues are all consequences of mismanaging teenagers’ proper use of games.

8 Tips for Raising Children Who Play Online and Offline Games

Awareness of important parenting tips regarding the use of online and offline games helps you become a knowledgeable parent and make informed decisions. This is the most critical part of ensuring your child’s upbringing is conducted appropriately while considering all aspects. In this section, you will find 6 important tips for raising children.

1. Experience the Games

One exciting way to improve closeness with your child and gain a deep understanding of games is to join them. Ask them what they enjoy about the game and what they gain from it. Try to review the type of game. Evaluate its rigidity or achievements. Try to suggest better games without outright opposition or show enthusiasm for continuing if the game is approved.

2. Set Limits for Children’s Online Gaming

As mentioned throughout, games can have many positive and negative aspects. Through gaming, you can experience numerous achievements. So, understand that it’s entirely natural for children to want to spend time gaming. However, your responsibility is to control this time so that your child attends to all their duties and tasks. Therefore, you must establish permissible gaming limits from childhood. This way, the child’s behavior in adolescence will also be disciplined, respecting the boundaries of such entertainment. Sometimes, setting boundaries on phone and gaming time turns your relationship into a battlefield. But this is when you must be vigilant and, with the advice of child and adolescent psychologists, follow an appropriate approach.

3. Set Limits to Ensure Sleep

One vital parameter for children and adults is daily sleep duration. You can easily set principles for using online and offline games by establishing limits for children and teenagers. Parental rules must be smart! You need to know which rules can define the child’s usage limits. Restricting mobile and tablet use by children in bed is one of the best mechanisms to protect quality sleep. Setting rules should be equally smart and vigilant!

4. Discuss the Costs They Spend on Games

In many cases, online games involve certain costs. Purchasing gift cards to progress in a game is one of the primary actions taken by children and teenagers. There have even been cases where children resorted to undesirable actions to cover these costs! Therefore, you must educate them consciously and emphasize the importance of involving parents in such decisions.

5. Present Gaming as a Reward for Performance

Children should be encouraged through parental performance to achieve appropriate behavior at all levels. When parents smartly issue gaming permissions based on daily tasks, school assignments, positive actions, and good interaction with parents, gaming becomes a reward with a set time. This way, you can reinforce children’s positive actions throughout the day and provide the dopamine needed for their joy and excitement through gaming. However, this method is only suitable for children and requires consultation with a psychologist for teenagers.

6. Seek Skill- and Knowledge-Enhancing Games

As mentioned earlier, games can significantly help enhance skills and provide entertaining yet educational information. Therefore, as a parent, you can be meticulous from the earliest childhood games and make principled, smart choices. This way, you can confidently observe the best and highest-quality impact from online and offline games. Some games designed for children even teach how to behave in online spaces, gradually increasing the child’s awareness to act wisely in virtual spaces and avoid numerous dangers.

7. Take Game Age Ratings Seriously

One issue often overlooked by parents is considering game age ratings. The level of violence, graphics, and details in games are produced and offered based on different age groups. You should choose games appropriate for your child’s age based on these details. However, in some cases, these age ratings are not precisely specified, and you must personally review the game and evaluate it through reliable sources.

8. Make Children Aware of Identity Theft

Identity theft is one consequence of children’s presence in virtual spaces. Unfortunately, children’s lack of awareness creates opportunities for this exploitation. You can prevent this by educating your child and explaining the consequences of such events. Parents, through awareness and education, can reduce the risk of these issues and make children cautious about sharing important personal or family information.

Recognize Warning Signs

Some signs can alert you to a problem! By observing these signs, you can easily plan, review, and seek help from a child and adolescent specialist. Warning signs always give you enough time to act. Therefore, you must take their identification and review seriously. Some of these signs include the following:

• Persistent feelings of fatigue throughout the day.
• Difficulty focusing on school or university tasks!
• Lack of priority for essential daily tasks like hygiene, sleep, rest, bathing, and eating!
• Lack of communication and interaction with family or peers can be a warning sign of addiction to online and offline games.
• Constantly carrying the phone and focusing on it is also a warning sign.
• Emergence of violent or aggressive behaviors.
• Lack of interaction and communication to resolve daily life issues.
• Lack of interest in being outside the home and a tendency toward silence and using a gaming console or phone.

Permissible Parental Actions in Warning Situations

If any of these warning signs are present in your child, you definitely need to take a set of actions. These actions help you act wisely in every area and pursue your child’s upbringing and growth without mistakes.

1. Consult with Psychologists

If you’ve noticed some of these signs in your child, it’s time to seek help from child and adolescent psychologists. This action helps you raise the issues and take steps toward improvement with deep scientific insight. Ending a gaming session is often difficult and upsetting. This action triggers reactions like aggression, frustration, anxiety, and similar issues. However, by explaining the situation and receiving guidance from specialists, you can effectively manage such events.

2. Take Emotional Support Seriously

Sometimes, constant gaming indicates various issues and suppressed needs in your child or teenager. Therefore, you must take support seriously and investigate your child’s needs. If your child needs to talk, dedicate this time to them and try to consider entertainment beyond gaming. This approach can shift your child’s focus from games and introduce other practical solutions.

3. Review Academic Performance

In some cases, parents’ concerns about their children’s gaming are excessive, and everything seems exaggerated in their minds. Therefore, for more serious and precise follow-up, you need to review your child’s academic performance and inquire about their classroom situation. This information helps you understand exactly what’s happening. Is your child unable to focus due to constant gaming? Has a severe addiction formed? Understanding the answers to these questions will clarify everything.

4. Reassess Rules

If you’re a disciplined parent who has set a specific framework for your child’s gaming from childhood, you definitely need to review the situation and identify potential flaws. You must know exactly where the mistake lies if your child isn’t following the rules! Try to review the rules and evaluate their implementation. This way, you have a high chance of resuming actions for a safe family environment.

5. Foster Culture and Values

Your children must recognize and internalize high values in the safe family environment. Fostering culture is also a crucial part of this. Imagine a child who, from the earliest days of understanding the world, sees a family spending a lot of time on phones! The result of growing up in such an environment without fostering culture and adhering to rules is raising children and teenagers constantly using phones. This way, they feel no need for interaction and have few friends around them. These issues create undesirable consequences that significantly impact a child’s or teenager’s life negatively. However, imagine raising a child in a family that gathers together during meals, allocates specific times for phone use, and limits phone usage during gatherings by keeping devices in bags or pockets; the outcome will be entirely different. Such an individual accepts gaming and entertainment within a framework of rules and embraces a healthy lifestyle with all its details, activities, and priorities. Therefore, fostering values and culture for using various technological devices is highly important.

Conclusion

Considering all the points mentioned in this article, you must dedicate time to prepare your children’s minds for a mysterious and sometimes vulnerable world when they experience online and offline games. Awareness of how to interact with children and teenagers, alongside their proper education, is essential.

1. Always show genuine interest, both inwardly and outwardly, in your children’s games to understand what features or parts they enjoy and what engages them.

2. Ask them who they play with and what they talk about during games. Even inquire about the topics and tone of their conversations. Ensure your child is aware of offensive or socially inappropriate behavior and informs you.

3. Children know how to disable airplane mode on phones, so you need to use parental protection apps to ensure your child plays offline, doesn’t make in-app purchases, and doesn’t interact with strangers during games.

4. Learn about the age ratings of various games. Commensense media and IMDB and some asian organizations like Chibino, Esra and Kodomo in Iran have partially provided these ratings. Talk to your children to ensure they understand why some games are not suitable for their age.

5. Mobile games can be highly addictive, so determine how many hours they are allowed to play and with whom they can play online. Remind them that people may hide behind fake profiles and may not be who they claim to be.

6. Talk to your children to ensure that friends they play online with don’t enter their social media circles, neighborhoods, or other parts of their lives. Cultural differences are not detectable through online games. Even sharing personal information like location, family income, or parents’ jobs during online games is highly risky.

Imino offers a “time lock” feature for parents to allocate gaming time on mobile devices, and with the “app internet management” feature, parents can enable or disable internet access for apps.

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