Several articles have been published in the last few months about “Fortnite” and children becoming addicted to it. At the end of November, Bloomberg reported a piece that has reverberated in the minds and homes of parents with teens and adolescents: “’Fortnite’ addiction is forcing some kids into video-game rehab.” While as a parent I completely understand how hard it seems to be to police a child as they fight the pull of “Fortnite,” a post-apocalyptic competition, on the other hand, it seems like some parents are acting like they aren’t in charge of their home, devices, or money.
While children can be unpredictable (they say and do things out of your control), devices can be cut off, put on pause, sold, given away, or thrown in the trash.
The mom in the Bloomberg piece said her 17-year-old son was logging on for up to 12 hours a day. His grades were suffering and the kid wasn’t sleeping. “We’d made some progress in getting him to cut down his ‘Fortnite’ hours and get better sleep, but he’s slipped back into his old habits,” Vitany said. “I’ve never seen a game that has such control over kids’ minds.”
The piece quoted an expert, Lorrine Marer, a British behavioral specialist who works with kids battling game addiction. “This game is like heroin. Once you are hooked, it’s hard to get unhooked.”
As a mother of four children, one of whom really enjoys “Fortnite” and plays it quite a bit, I understand this frustration. I understand the perspective of parents like Haller, who wrote in “All the Moms” in USA Today, about how hard it is to maintain boundaries on devices. Yes, you are the parent, you steer the ship, in fact, you are the reason they have a ship, as I have told my children at least one time (although in my son’s defense, he actually purchased his $300 PlayStation 4 with his own money).
Yet at the same time, as children get older, they push back against those boundaries and limitations with regularity and with surprising ease. Haller wrote, “I have three daughters. One is absolutely hooked on ‘Fortnite.’ My 12-year-old has lost her electronic device privileges for a week for failure to call it quits when I say. She has been threatened, yelled at, badgered, and the Wi-Fi has been cut to the whole house more times than I can count because of THAT game.”
I feel this with every fiber of my being.
Like Haller, at times I’ve thought: Holy cow, if I see that screen one more time and take their privileges away another day I am going to have to throw the PS4 out the window. It not only possesses this magnetic pull on my children’s brains, calling them when they have down time, but if I had a dollar for every time I have talked about “Fornite” with them, we would have a million dollars.
This is how the two-headed dragon of devices exploits our children. There’s one voice in parents’ heads that says, “I’m in charge of this household and you will play ‘Fortnite’ when I let you play ‘Fortnite,’ and because if I didn’t pay my bills, you wouldn’t even have the electricity or internet to play it with.” There’s another voice that says, “What is this game even doing that my kid wants to play on it rather than eat dinner?”
My son discussed “Fortnite” addiction with his classmates and a teacher in school; he then came home and relayed the conversation to me. He acknowledged how badly he wants to play it and will often sneak off to play it when it’s not allowed or how it’s almost like a default on a lazy Saturday morning — and yet he laughed when we discussed addiction and rehab. “I mean, parents are in charge,” he said with a bit of a smirk (out of the mouths of babes). “It’s weird kids are getting addicted. Parents should be more strict.”
I’m reminding him later that he said that.
While I sympathize with the struggle, articles about “Fortnite” addiction should encourage the rest of us to remain firm or create even more firm boundaries. It’s a good exercise for parents and children alike to lay down boundaries and exercise those with punitive measures when those are not honored. This helps children learn a measure of respect and self-control. Typically, the rule for my kids has been they are not allowed to play on devices during the school week. Often this doesn’t happen, not because I haven’t said that is the rule, but because I’ll get busy with another child and next thing you know the PS4 has magically turned on and a child has been sucked into its vortex.
If parents find their children developing a need to play it regularly (I hesitate to call it an addiction) perhaps they should consider cutting it off cold turkey either permanently or allow it at certain times, within limits, and often as a reward.
In our family, on the weekends, or the occasional weeknight if homework is done, I’ll turn a timer on. When it goes off, time is up — that’s it. The neutral timer provides a bit of buffer between parent and child and device.
That said, if a child is really getting wrapped up in “Fortnite” (or anything else that kids and teenagers may be obsessing over) I wouldn’t be afraid to simply take it away. This goes for phones and other types of devices. In fact, I see far more addiction to phones among my friends with older kids.
You’re the parent, aren’t you? You pay for the electric bill, don’t you? You drove them to the store to purchase the PS4/iPad/iPhone/tablet, didn’t you? It’s a hard thing to do and I certainly struggle with it, but there’s always the option to remove the issue at hand if you need to in order to save your sanity and to help your child’s mental well-being.
Nicole Russell (@russell_nm) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is a journalist who previously worked in Republican politics in Minnesota.
