One new father, Jim Festante, 41, said that during the first six months of caring for his newborn, he spent some nights sacrificing what sleep he might have gotten to blow off steam by playing video games. “It was necessary self-care,” said Festante. “It was definitely necessary.”

Festante’s experience isn’t unusual, according to Christopher Ferguson, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at Stetson University, who co-wrote the book “Moral Combat: Why the War on Violent Video Games Is Wrong.” In it, Dr. Ferguson and his co-author argued, after reviewing research, that one session of playing video games (the length of which can vary, Dr. Ferguson said) can release similar amounts of the “feel-good” brain chemical dopamine as eating a bowl of ice cream. “It’s the No. 1 benefit,” said Dr. Ferguson. “Games are stress-reducing and children are not.”

As with the occasional bowl of ice cream, Dr. Ferguson said, there’s nothing “inherently wrong” with playing a video game to relieve stress every now and then. But experts have said that when it becomes too hard to stop gaming — even when it’s affecting other parts of your life — that’s when it might become a problem.

[How to avoid burnout when you have little ones.]

Laura Stockdale, Ph.D, a psychologist and project manager for Project M.E.D.I.A. at Brigham Young University, is currently collecting data on 510 gaming and nongaming families over the next 20 years to research the effects of media on child development and the likelihood that pathological gaming tendencies will develop. Dr. Stockdale said she worries that parents who binge on video games, especially in front of their children, might be neglecting to show how much they value their children by failing to listen or pay attention to them while they game.

Dr. Stockdale said she gets concerned, for instance, when parents justify their own video game habits by saying that it’s O.K. because their child is “is playing with” them. “Their 3-year-old isn’t actually playing,” she explained. “You can’t just hand a 3-year-old a controller and say they’re playing.”

Last year, the World Health Organization included “gaming disorder” as a clinically recognizable and significant syndrome in its latest edition of the International Classification of Diseases. Gaming disorder can occur with both online and offline games and includes symptoms such as “marked distress” or an inability to function in a variety of situations, both personal and professional.

Douglas Gentile, Ph.D., a psychologist and professor of developmental psychology at Iowa State University who studies the effects of gaming in children and adults, said that pathological gaming behavior (a term that he said can be used interchangeably with gaming disorder or gaming addiction) is defined as forgoing family time, work or social engagements to game. Typically, experts won’t define something as an addiction until it impacts more than one area of a person’s life, Dr. Gentile said, or when someone wants to cut back on gaming, for example, but can’t.