Gaming addicted teen, College work suffering big time!

[mwgdrwg]

I have learnt tonight that World of Warcraft may have parental controls!

Why did none of you mention this to me? why?

No 'may' about it. It does! https://us.battle.net/account/parental-controls/index.html

A note about parental controls...we have an Xbox and Microsoft have great controls to limit content. The key is in creating a child account rather than an adult one at the start. The same account is then used on our Windows 10 PC to log in, and as the parent I get a weekly usage mail which shows hours used, applications used, and any suspicious activity.

Family - Microsoft Help
Set limits for your child - Microsoft Help

 

[Cid]

I used to play WoW.

Er... I'd recommend deleting his account.

 

[weltweit]

It might well be time to have a meeting with his teachers of some kind. However his mum has been trying to open up communications with his computing teachers and they seem to have been ignoring her which is quite a pain!

There is a parents evening coming up, his mum is determined to use this opportunity, I am thinking whether I can get up for it also.

 

[weltweit]

I didn't really want to read this:

Video games may actually have positive effects on young children, study finds

 

[mrs quoad]

I didn't really want to read this:

Video games may actually have positive effects on young children, study finds

6-11 year olds.

Where children who 'played video games for more than 5h per week' (only 20% / one in five of them) were classified as the top / most intensively-playing group.

And in a cross-sectional survey, which is completely unable to attribute causality - i.e., it could be hypothesised that children from high socio-economic groups are likely to have greater access to computers. It could also be hypothesised that bored children play more games, and intelligent children get more bored.

Long story short: extrapolating this to your son's situation would be one hell of a long reach. And if he isn't outperforming the other kids in his year, then it's... clearly... inapplicable. Because it isn't applying. Because he isn't outperforming the other kids in his year.

Edit: 'Having a less educated, single, inactive, or psychologically distressed mother decreased time spent playing video games.'

I'm going to conjecture that it might be pretty hard to adequately control for some of the factors associated with 'decreased' (or, tbh, increased) time spent playing video games. And that it'd be pretty damned hard to prove that the relationship between playing computer games and academic performance identified by this study isn't / wasn't spurious at worst, and inordinately messy at best.

 

[Cid]

I didn't really want to read this:

Video games may actually have positive effects on young children, study finds

You do, because - were it not fundamentally flawed when applied to your case (see quoad) - it would mean that everything is fine.

Do you know how many hours a day he plays btw? It's worth getting this sorted, otherwise when he leaves it's going to be a case of 'wow, I've got 16 gaming hours/day!' And he'll live in your/his mum's spare room/basement for the next ten years.

 

[Pickman's model]

My 16 year old son is addicted to PC gaming, WOW especially, and various others, also just spending hours on end skyping and or facebooking his mates. Normally this would not matter but he is now seriously behind on his 6th form school work, to such an extent he may well completely fail his AS exams and get booted out of college.

Anyone have any ideas?

change his courses to those where proficiency in wow is an advantage

 

[moon]

I recently discovered that many people in the tech department at work are addicted to WoW, some of them are engineers in their 50's..

 

[weltweit]

You do, because - were it not fundamentally flawed when applied to your case (see quoad) - it would mean that everything is fine.

Do you know how many hours a day he plays btw? It's worth getting this sorted, otherwise when he leaves it's going to be a case of 'wow, I've got 16 gaming hours/day!' And he'll live in your/his mum's spare room/basement for the next ten years.

He plays many hours a day and more at weekends. He won't be permitted to leave college and doss, it is either college or a job / apprenticeship or some other useful activity. He just got a couple of Bs in recent computing tests so perhaps he is making more of an effort at the moment. If he is then perhaps he can continue in colege. I hope so.

 

[Cid]

He plays many hours a day and more at weekends. He won't be permitted to leave college and doss, it is either college or a job / apprenticeship or some other useful activity. He just got a couple of Bs in recent computing tests so perhaps he is making more of an effort at the moment. If he is then perhaps he can continue in colege. I hope so.

What are you going to do with him? If he drops out of college will you/she kick him out? It's not easy getting an apprenticeship/job at the moment and the fact he'd rather be sat at home playing WoW will probably come across in an interview. Limit his gaming hours. Ideally ban MMOs for as long as he's at home.

 

[weltweit]

.. Limit his gaming hours. Ideally ban MMOs for as long as he's at home.

Easier said than done, his mum doesn't want the aggravation. I have said clearly to him and her that if it were down to me I would cut the net off until 6.30 - 7pm so he has plenty of time for college work before that, but his mum is not in favour at the moment.

 

[Cid]

Easier said than done, his mum doesn't want the aggravation. I have said clearly to him and her that if it were down to me I would cut the net off until 6.30 - 7pm so he has plenty of time for college work before that, but his mum is not in favour at the moment.

I can't put myself in your position of course, I'm just talking from the perspective of someone who did a lot of gaming in late teens/uni and had friends who did. I lived with a single mum too (although my dad died when I was young) and I think it can be very difficult to deal with a 16 year old boy. Often easier to let them get on with it and, as you mention, avoid any aggravation. Could you suggest he stay with you for a bit? Give her a bit of space...

Also games like WoW promote a certain kind of very intensive gaming; it's the guild structure within the game and the commitment you form to guild activities. Offline games you can just pause and do something else for a bit. That's not possible in that kind of MMO - playing the game at high levels requires you to put a lot of time in. Thing is, once he's stopped, he'll have forgotten about it within a week, he's a teenager.

You could also change his PC use. Either by removing the graphics card (although even onboard graphics will run wow these days I suppose) or by getting some kind of netbook that won't run it. Or possibly ban the computer from his room.

 

[existentialist]

Easier said than done, his mum doesn't want the aggravation. I have said clearly to him and her that if it were down to me I would cut the net off until 6.30 - 7pm so he has plenty of time for college work before that, but his mum is not in favour at the moment.

It's probably good, in a way, that this option is apparently closed to you. I think, one way or the other, you're going to end up having to find a solution based on getting some kind of understanding of each other's motivations. Professional help is not necessarily the answer, just to clarify that

 

[moon]

Why, it seems a perfectly reasonable solution, it will also motivate him to do his college work so he can then play.

 

[QOTH]

My name is QOTH and I am a chronic procrastinator, and have been for as long as I can remember. It sounds trivial, but it has affected my life negatively in many ways.

I'm pretty sure the only reason I have any qualifications is because I did them before there was an array of 24-hour, instantaneous distraction options specifically designed to command my attention. Would it help to ignore the procrastination activity (WoW) and look at the procrastination itself? If you made WoW disappear, would hard work and application replace it, or something else?

There are quite a few resources online about procrastination, some of which are better than others - but I've found stuff on habit and behaviour change has made a big difference. On a really bad day (like today, when I'm procrastinating under the guise of helping other procrastinators) I will try to do even 5 minutes of concentration 'sprints' with breaks inbetween and once you start, it becomes easier to do more.

Also (as I think existentialist suggests) is there some consensus that you and his mum could build with him about what he wants to do and what he needs to do to get there? Also some mid-term rewards you could figure out to bridge the gap between 'big scary but quite distant goal' and 'what's easy and fun to do right now'?

Oh, and I can really recommend the app 'Rescue Time' - which monitors how much time you spend twatting about on your computer and also how much productive work you do. I'm not sure it's something that you could install against another user's will though, as it's not aimed at controlling someone else's activity, it's about getting stuff you want to do done, but if he buys into the idea that he might need to work a little harder, it could be something you use consensually.

 

[existentialist]

Oh, and I can really recommend the app 'Rescue Time' - which monitors how much time you spend twatting about on your computer and also how much productive work you do. I'm not sure it's something that you could install against another user's will though, as it's not aimed at controlling someone else's activity, it's about getting stuff you want to do done, but if he buys into the idea that he might need to work a little harder, it could be something you use consensually.

A good dialogue might actually enable Rescue Time to be talked about as a way of helping him start to manage his time - he may even recognise that there's a problem, but is steadfastly refusing to admit that to anyone else. Encouraging him to consider the "what if I am spending too much time on WoW" question without having to be instantly accountable for any doubts he might discover could have very useful results - and I will have to take a look at that app myself!

 

[Mr Moose]

If he really is "addicted", then the question probably needs to be - what is the problem that this addiction is the solution to?

I suspect that banning or otherwise preventing him from playing games is likely only to harden his position and make it more difficult to unravel what's going on, not to mention putting you into the role of enforcer/policeman rather than a more caring one.

In your shoes, I'd be trying to open up a discussion between equals, exploring with him what he gets out of the gaming (beyond "I enjoy it"), and what it helps him avoid. He may well not be happy in college, or (and I say this as a therapist who does some work with college students) is feeling like he has made the wrong choices/isn't getting on well with the subjects...in other words, the "addiction" is a compensatory activity aimed at making himself feel good at a time when it all feels fairly crap elsewhere.

Absolutely don't ban him from WOW, until he recognises he has a problem and starts asking you for help to deal with it. In the meantime, the best thing you can do is to set aside your panic about his future - if he's smart, he'll find a future anyway - and work at getting alongside him and achieving some kind of supportive alliance together. When he doesn't feel like you're judging him, policing him, or adopting some or other role that he perceives as hostile to his (present) interests, there's a chance that the pair of you will be able to work constructively together. Lower the boom on him, and you will just be another oppressor, out to make his life hard, and from which WoW is the only escape.

In my work, I often get very interesting results with what we tend to call "paradoxical interventions" - ie, doing the opposite, for good reasons, of what is expected of us. So I might point out that the kid who truants all the time (and is getting nothing but grief from everyone) is actually adopting a creative solution to a problem - "...so, what might that problem be?", and be able to engage in a constructive dialogue which, not unusually, makes the problem "just go away".

It may be that the solution in this case turns out to be him dropping out of college. That may feel enough like a catastrophe to him (not that he's likely to admit that at the moment) that he's ready to work constructively to avoid it, or at least find a decent Plan B, but all of the policing stuff will conveniently prevent him from having to address that - he can just focus on how fucking unfair it is (from his point of view) that as a nearly-adult, he's being babied by his parents, etc.

Sometimes we have to fail hard just to realise what it is we really want.

You get 'interesting' results. Do you get any useful ones? Cause it sounds full of air to me.

 

[existentialist]

You get 'interesting' results. Do you get any useful ones? Cause it sounds full of air to me.

Yes, I get useful results. I'm always impressed, even after years in practice, how effective giving people the option to choose to change a behaviour, rather than feeling obligated to change, is. Kids and adults.

 

[kalidarkone]

It is great to give people including kids the option but IMHO there is a line where the adult still has to has to take charge. A lot of teenagers can't cope with making life changing decisions- especially when they have an addiction problem and have not had any opportunity for reflection and need the adults to step in- even more so in a single parent family as there may be no recognised united front. I think his mum is making a huge mistake for a temporary easy life. But it won't be flipping easy for anyone if he is allowed to have his own way over something he is addicted to on many levels. Tough love.
Can you get mum to read this thread?