Like mine, your family has probably slipped into the cadence of the school year with the relative ease of a veteran. Thoughts have changed from summer days to fall foliage. And free time, once abundant, is now measured and suddenly more preciously guarded as parents look more carefully at what their children are doing with their time. “Play time” for many parents must include a healthy dose of exercise and/or learning. So how do we, as parents, reconcile the time our children spend in front of video or computer games? The answer is “moderation, balance and quality”.

By moderation I mean that our children’s use of their electronic arsenal does not take up an excessive amount of their free time. It is not healthy for a child to spend all or most of their free time playing computer games, video games, watching TV, etc. Yet I know that there are children who do just that.

As guardians of our children’s well-being we often seek balance in their lives, in the food they eat and the activities in which they participate. Logically, we should seek that same balance in their free time. Not only should we encourage our children to get outside, be physically active, engage themselves socially and play games that exercise their minds, but we should also see that there is some balance in their “electronic time”. This may seem like a strange idea; however, the extreme cases make the point. In the last year I have heard from concerned parents whose children spend hours on the computer in chat rooms or playing online gaming with WarCraft or EverQuest. There is almost an obsession with the activity that traps the child. Some of these electronic forms of communication are very addictive, and it is this developing addiction that is unhealthy. In March of last year, Stanford University Computer Science students Sandy Jen, Tricia Lee, Sandra Liu, and Justin Manus wrote several very interesting articles on “Computer Addiction and the Effect of the Internet on Personal Lives.” About internet gaming they said...

“More than any other aspect of computer technology, it seems that computer gaming has realized the potential to create addictive behavior among its users. Specifically, we examine the outgrowth of computer gaming and Internet technologies that has created "massively multi-player" games. These games involve thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of users who all participate in the same game; this model applies from role-playing games like Asheron’s Call, Everquest, to text-based MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons).

However, while many people can control the amount of time that they spend on a gaming service, there is a statistically significant percentage of people who cannot set limits on the amount of time that they play online games. This addiction to computer gaming takes over their lives, and addicts begin to focus their lives around playing computer games at the expense of their real-world relationships. A gamer becomes absorbed in their gaming world, creating many social connections within the online world, but simultaneously severing many preexisting connections with the physically local world.”