This is the best summary I could come up with:
Dee had read a newspaper article about a new NHS National Centre for Gaming Disorders that was being set up; she made contact, but the service wasn’t taking on patients yet.
The story of Dee – and Jake, who agreed to be featured in this article, but preferred not to be interviewed – is depressingly familiar to Professor Henrietta Bowden-Jones OBE, the founder and director of the National Centre for Gaming Disorders.
In 2008, she founded the first National Problem Gambling clinic: the NHS now has the capacity to treat up to 3,000 patients a year in 15 centres across the UK based on Bowden-Jones’s methodology.
We sat in a grand, high-ceilinged room in Earl’s Court, which is also the current base for the gambling clinic, and discussed what form an article might take.
The centre, which had been set up with a plan to see all patients face-to-face in London, pivoted swiftly to video calls, which remains the format its therapy sessions still take.
Bowden-Jones has been pushing for urgent extra funding and the clinic has taken the difficult decision to pause family work: this has brought the assessment waiting time down from over a year to three months.
The original article contains 2,281 words, the summary contains 200 words. Saved 91%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
parents are less involved in their kids livesit’s no longer safe for kids to play outside in many placessocietal distancing is worse then everthere’s a mental health crisis that has been ignoredthere’s a lack in healthy role models and an abundance of toxic onesall across the world there’s political turmoil caused by politicians convincing the people to hate eachother rather than those in poweraddiction has been normalized, kids watch their parents glued to their phones and they learnkids are taught that they can become anything but will need to come to grips with the reality that they simply cannot- Muh video games
Video game addiction is a symptom of multiple societal issues, you cannot simply solve it dealing with the symptom.
By “no longer safe to play outside” are you referring to the people operating child murdering trucks?
I live in a city outside of the US, it’s not particularly safe for kids to play outside as there is crazy traffic and nowhere to really go.
There are just a few small parks in the city and they are not easily accessible.
When I lived in the states, I played outside with friends in the suburbs, but stopped around high school, as there were very few kids in my neighborhood and previous friends moved away/outgrew playing as they were older than me.
Thanks this is far better then the posts blaming parents like they’re the only vector in their child’s life.
While parents certainly have a part to play societal issues are the underlying cause.
And making their parents lives better would address most of those societal issues.
But it’s so much easier to just blame the one thing, pretend to do something about it, and claim we’ve made progress.
10 years old… impossible to resist
The solution here is parenting.
I have kids that age, my kids have consoles, and they don’t play into the wee hours of the morning. Why? Because I don’t let them. I don’t have draconian parental controls or whatever, I just tell them they’re not allowed and put consequences in place if they disobey. As they get older, the allowed playtime goes up, provided they’re meeting their obligations.
It’s not rocket surgery, just don’t suck at being a parent.
That said, I imagine there are cases where even a good parent can not notice deviant behavior like this. But for the vast majority, a few rules and regular checking in should cover it.
I know when I was a kid I always wanted to sneak out (to the other room) and play more games after bed. A couple times Many times I did. And I got caught, and got in trouble.
Yup, that’s my plan as well.
I learned far more about setting reasonable limits by getting caught than I ever would with software blocks. I was very curious about computers, so I probably could’ve gotten around software blocks if I tried, but the guilt of my parents catching me and explaining why I need limits was much more effective.
It takes more effort, but hopefully the lessons learned are more lasting.
Yep I would try to find ways around. Games my parents wouldn’t get me I’d give money to my friends to buy me a copy when they went off to get their own. And that’s fine. Important thing is boundaries are something they are aware of even if they break them. That to me seems like parenting. It’s not fool proof and rules are going to get broken, but it’s not a reason to not make an effort.
Every console and PC has parental controls that limit screen time. It’s 100% on parents if they don’t set it up.
Or, do what my mom did and take it away. I hated her for it, but I admit 20 years later that that was called parenting.
I refuse to use parental controls, because I know my kids will find a way around it (I would). I instead set firm rules with relatively severe consequences if they’re not followed. Once I login to the PC, there’s no time limit, content filters, etc.
That said, my youngest kept getting into the Switch and messing up peoples’ saves, so I put a parental lock on it, but I told my older kids the code and told them I trust them with it. If they abuse their time with it, they lose the console privilege.
It seems to be working. I’ll probably give them a PC soon since they’re doing a decent job stopping when their timer goes off (they set the timer according to our rules). We have limits (2hr max per day, must be done with homework, they earn time by reading), but again, I don’t enforce them with software, I enforce them with the threat of loss of privileges.
Parents not being good at setting boundaries. Not setting times to go to bed, not limiting time spent playing games or on electronics, and not checking in on how they are doing with school work. They are the ones controlling the finances of what can be bought and used in the household, but they just become pushovers.
just a cope for the shitty world that the people who write articles like this helped to create, nbd