3 ms·

Can you elaborate?

• brightball 8y ago
  Getting seriously upset if he couldn't get to the iPad. To the point of tears. He knew his "schedule" of exactly how long he had to wait for new things to be unlocked in the game. Clicked every ad that he could to get bonus things. Saw so many of the ad videos that he wanted to download more "free" games. Eventually he had a few of these going that had timed item releases that if he didn't get to his ipad for every single one of them, it became very upsetting to the point of almost debilitating. None of this stuff had ever happened with any previous games on the Nintendo consoles we have. We never saw anything like it when he'd watch kid shows on Netflix or family movies. We ended up taking the iPad away completely one day when he accidentally did something around the house that really hurt his mom...and his only concern was when he could get back on the games. At that point...we were done. iPad/iPhone games have been entirely gone ever since and after a couple of days when I explained to him what those games were doing to him, he seemed to get it and doesn't even want to play them anymore. He plays Wii with his sister or friends, watches TV or movies periodically but it's all at a level I would call healthly. There's no addictive behavior to it and if he can't play, he just can't play. It's not a big deal and he finds something else to do. He doesn't choose anything else over family or time with friends. But every one of those iDevice games seem engineered to get that type of behavior. I'm now extremely wary of any "free" games that are out there, which has been difficult because I've been keeping him away from Fortnite all summer. A lot of the parent stories that I've heard / read from it have made me feel a lot better about the decision though. At this point, "free" video games connected to the internet are a hard pass at my house.