Good morning.
This article is Part 2 in a two part series about parenting and video games. Part 1 was published last Monday, August 18th and went into my own personal history growing up with video games and the involvement of various parents and parental figures during the 80's and 90's. I wrote that to help add some context for today's article wherein I talk about the approach both Conklederp and I take with our five year old, The Squire, not only in regards to video games, but visual entertainment, aka "screens," and I'll also delve a bit into other forms of entertainment (audio, physical media, physical games, etc) as I attempt to create a cohesive article that y'all'll want to read to the end.
A quick disclaimer that I'm reiterating from Monday's article. What I'm writing here isn't meant to be a How-To article about how to raise your or any child in regards to video games. All kids are different, and I won't claim to have any expertise about raising kids in general, let alone my own kid. I don't know if I'll ever be able to say that I'm an expert at being a parent, as I'm constantly growing, taking in everything I learn, especially from The Squire. So with that in mind, let's get to it.
I genuinely don't know the first time we introduced "screens," primarily phone screens, to The Squire. We have these expensive bricks of wires, microchips and plastics in our pockets nearly 24 hours a day, not only as a communication device, but also as a way to take pictures and relay them from other people. He was born in the early months of the COVID-19 Pandemic, when communicating with our families via video call/FaceTime was our primary way of communicating. Phone calls themselves seemed trivial when you could video call someone and talk to them face-to-face, when it was advised not to mix households or quarantine for 14 days before doing so. It's perfectly normal for new parents to want to take pictures of their brand new child, and with today's technology, those photos and videos are instantly available, so rather than a baby looking a a large black box with a circular lens, they're essentially looking at a digital mirror. They've grown up with these devices nearly everywhere. I mean, I have a picture of The Squire resting against Conklederp literally 20 minutes after he was born. There was no way I wasn't going to be taking pictures and videos of this child and not be sending them to our respective family members because his grandparents weren't able to physically meet him until two weeks and two months after he was born. So we took pictures and videos. A lot. Which meant he became accustomed to these devices being out pretty frequently. I have an adorable video of The Squire from June 19th, 2021, where he's looking at the screen of the phone I'm holding, facing us, and as he smiles, he starts emphatically waving at himself, and his smile increases tenfold. I regret nothing.
The point is, The Squire knows what screens are. What's also interesting is that because of his time spent with phones and Conklederp's iPad, he habitually thinks that most screens are touchscreens. My non-touchscreen laptop, he'll frequently touch the screen to try and scroll or select things. He'll sometimes try and touch our TV screen futilely. We even bought him a phonics word tile game-thing because of how much he loved to play Words with Friends with Conklederp's parents. He was less interested in the physical game than the digital one, likely because the physical game didn't have built-in sound effects and because there weren't any reactions to The Squire accidentally tapping on a button to pay money to Zynga in the app; this would often elict a reaction that he thought was hilarious and would then try to recreate it every couple of seconds.
In July 2022, I first introduced The Squire to games on my laptop because our TV and consoles are in the basement, and I didn't want to show him something where he might be inclined to try and walk down a flight of stairs on his own. Games like the Peggle series, which he's named "Old Horse Game" and "New Horse Game," Plants vs. Zombies ("Zombie game"), and Boomerang F.U. ("Watermelon Game") were some early titles. Basically, games that required a mouse to play, which is pretty funny because I have a picture from when he was two years old and he's sitting at our kitchen table holding a much-too-large mouse in his right hand (even though he's predominantly left-handed) and trying to click on my homescreen. Over a year later, he really got into Crumble ("Silly Face Game"), being an early controller game, although it was another game that he wanted me to play. He didn't so much play Crumble so much as enjoyed watching me play it. "Watching" being the key verb there because it's hard to determine how much he was able to comprehend about video games, but that's perfectly fine, too, and a definite step up from just plunking him down in front of a screen and leaving him be.
I think I've come to the crux of my article. In the early days of him sitting on my lap watching me play either Plants vs. Zombies or Icewind Dale, or Tears of the Kingdom, it was a visually stimulating activity for him (to some degree) and engaging for both of us. Maybe? I would try to explain to him what it was that I was playing and what I was doing and it was something that we were doing together. The Squire would also like to watch Conklederp Mario Kart 8 Deluxe in handheld mode on the Switch for slightly the same reasons that he would sit on my lap, although I was significantly less animated than when Conklederp would get hit by the Blue Shell or get knocked off a track. We were playing video games with The Squire.
I think if Conklederp and I used the Switch or our phones/computers as the only way to keep him occupied and didn't pay attention to anything he was doing on said screens, we would likely have a problem, but that's not how we've decided to raise our kid.
However, I have been guilty of using video games to help me out during certain circumstances. On Friday morning (August 22nd, 2025), I booted up Super Mario Wonder in the basement on our TV because The Squire wanted to play, but I was upstairs making waffles for breakfast and getting his lunch ready for preschool and my own lunch to take to work. He did frequently call up to me to see something that he had done, and I did go down to watch him every second waffle to still be somewhat engaged with him. It's not something that I do all of the time, sometimes you just need to get something done that will take 10 minutes by yourself or 45 minutes with a kid running around underneath, wondering why Cull Obsidian doesn't have his own movie, and can I lightsaber battle with him, and if I can pull up the Lego Murder video (it's more innocent than it sounds), and can he have another popsicle?
Over the last year, since he's really been trying to read everything in existence, which is great, and I will foster that desire forever, he has asked about video games and movies to a lesser extent that are very inappropriate for him. Games like Layers of Fear, or Conarium, or DOOM (2016), or movies like The Terminator, or The Exorcist, or Suicide Club. Most of the time, we'll generally tell him that a game or a movie is "too intense" for him and that he could watch/play when he's older. He's currently stuck on the response, "Oh, when I'm 20 I can watch Terminator," or "When I'm 20 I can play Skyrim"; this fascination with 20 is from a Lego YouTuber who points out that he's 20 years old on a slightly more than irregular basis.
Speaking of YouTube, let's briefly touch on that subject before we sign off. There's a lot of crap on YouTube and YouTube Kids, but Conklederp and I have somewhat whittled down what the Squire watches on a semi-regular basis. Everything that he watches has been pre-approved by Conklederp and me, and The Squire will frequently ask to "watch liked videos" rather than let YouTube's algorithm offer what they think is appropriate for a five-year-old, and I'll be damned if they try to suggest Cocomelon or Blippy. Even stuff that he likes to watch that neither of us are a fan of, in that we don't see it as harmful but it's not something that we would ever watch, we will still watch those videos with him.
Showing him that we have interest in his interests by either actively or passively participating is really what I've been trying to get at these last 3,200+ words. Lord knows I watched Chitty Bang Bang and nearly wore out our taped-from-TV-VHS copies of Return of the Jedi and Superman 2 as a kid and if The Squire wants to watch the same Lego YouTuber do silly self-imposed challenges for the third time in a row or wants me to play the "Jump! Jump! Jump!" stage in Super Mario Bros. Wonder, then sure, I can oblige him. He's my kid and I want to show an interest in his interests. And I know for sure that 10-year-old me would have been beyond psyched knowing that one day I would have a kid that asked him to play Donkey Kong, and not the recently released Donkey Kong Bananza, but the 1981 NES port of the original arcade classic Donkey Kong.
~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
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