From fun to addiction. How to deal with your child's obsession with gaming?

Imagine the horror – You are looking across the breakfast table at your 12 year-old and you suddenly realize beyond a doubt that you are staring into the bleary eyes of an addict. Questions flood your mind. How could this have happened? Why didn’t I notice it before? Why him? What do we do now?

Later, when he is on the school bus and the house is quiet you reflect on your set of questions. The first one – how did this happen doesn’t make any sense to you. It’s not drugs. You’ve gotten that message across very well. You don’t even think he’s had a drink. He doesn’t have bad friends and negative influences in his life. He’s actually quite a loner. Honestly, you wish he had more friends and got out of the house more. You and your husband liked the way he gravitated to focusing on his computer and indeed his grades were great. So when he asked for the gaming system and all the accessories there was no hesitation to include it for his last birthday. In hindsight you realize that even though you noticed that he was spending every hour at home upstairs in his room on the computer you didn’t realize that he wasn’t doing homework. Not that is, until grades came out last week.

Last night you laid down the law that there would be no gaming until homework was done and subsequently checked in on him every half hour. That’s when you knew there was a problem. He simply couldn’t keep off the gaming sight. When your husband sat with him while he tried to write a paper for class the next day he got more and more irritable as the minutes ticked away without being online. Your husband said he could actually see him unconsciously reaching out to the mouse to click on the game icon. He was almost like a zombie.

Now, as you browse online and read about markers of addiction you can see what you couldn’t see before. His isolation from friends and family was clearly a marker. So too were the compulsive urges that he demonstrated last night. His irritability when he couldn’t go online and his inability to stop himself even when he knew that he should be studying were also signs. But it really came to a head when you and your husband sat down with him last night and asked him why he spent so much time gaming. Your 12 year-old started to cry when he explained that it was something that he had to do every night. He described how he waited all day until he could get home and get on line. That was now the only thing that made him feel alive and happy. He felt disinterested and impatient between times he was online.

But why your son? You had always done your very best to shield him from what you had always associated with addiction - drugs. You had always checked out his friends and made sure that they were good kids. The drug talk had occurred early and often and you had never caught him in any suspicious activities. So why was he now addicted to gaming?

That’s when you did some more research and learned about something called the ‘Addictive Personality’. While you discovered that this isn’t a medical diagnosis you did find lots of information about a set of characteristics associated with a vulnerability to addiction. Your twelve-year-old’s significant difficulties coping with frustration along with his tendency to become obsessive about the things that attracted him made sense now. You thought about how he becomes so absorbed in a movie or a puzzle that he sticks with it for hours without break. You also think about the tantrums when he finds out that a puzzle piece is missing or that a family outing had been cancelled. So too, you are able to see his awkwardness around kids his own age and his inability to keep friends as being a result of poor social skills. You can now see how all of these characteristics contributed to putting him at risk of developing an addiction.

But what do you and your husband do now? How can you help your son? The first thing that you learned is that what has been categorized as an Addictive Personality is something that has to be dealt with for a lifetime. It’s not something that is grown out of. You will need to teach your 12 year old skills that will last him a life time.

Luckily, there is a lot more research and understanding about how to help your son. One piece of advice that you found particularly encouraging was the thought of channeling these same personality characteristics into more positive outcomes. Your day of online research reveals that many highly successful individuals show the same compulsive, obsessional behaviors that your son is exhibiting. Indeed, the drive that it takes to create an invention, set up and manage a company, become a famed surgeon or Silicon Valley IT inventor can often be described as obsessive. This means looking for ways to channel your son’s passions into creative tasks that challenge him intellectually rather than the mind and body numbing repetitiveness of gaming.

But you also want him to be a whole person who has friends and a family. This will mean developing the coping skills that he does not currently have. To accomplish this may mean going outside the family for help. Someone experienced in cognitive behavioral therapy could be a great support in teaching him methods of self-regulation. One of the interesting methods that a therapist might teach your son is how to use relaxation practices to self-soothe when he is feeling frustrated and feel compelled to drop into a mind-numbing computer game.

You also discover that exercise, sports, and outdoor activity, especially in the company of others, can be a great way to interrupt the obsessive compulsions. Signing you 12 year-old up for a Karate class or a sport that he enjoys could also be something to try.

All in all, after your day of research you feel much more equipped to help your entire family to get through this. You know it isn’t something that is a quick fix. But you do know that there are a lot of things that you can do to help all of you out of this crisis.

Image Credit: Ben Andreas Harding (https://www.flickr.com/photos/38605609@N02/7832821594/)