There’s much less of a divide between millennials, Gen Z, and Gen Alpha when it comes to gaming, especially compared to millennials and Gen X. We grew up with gaming after all, and for this reason, many people consider it a healthy inclusion into their media diet. These days, many people even prefer gaming to watching television shows or movies.
It’s a rapidly evolving and developing industry, with gamers of all ages able to enjoy interactive experiences together at home. There’s no need to argue superiority here, of course, as all forms of media have their benefits and drawbacks.
However, it’s worth noticing that gaming can be uniquely social, in that it inspires you to solve problems alongside your co-operative partner. Even if you’re just watching someone else play a game, that sense of autonomous discovery can be hard to replicate elsewhere.
Bonding with your kids through gaming
As it turns out, it can be very healthy to bond with your kids through gaming. In this post, we’ll discuss some of the best ways to achieve that. The main benefits of playing games with your kids are in terms of social bonding. By spending quality time engaged in a game together, you’ll create a lifetime’s worth of happy memories with your children.
Additionally, you’ll find that such collaborative experience actually helps to bring you closer together emotionally. This all helps to further build their trust in you, to confide in struggles they’re having in school or to share any concerns they might have around their physical well-being, such as easily missed eczema symptoms that might require a paediatric dermatologist visit. It’s hard to have eyes in the back of your head as a parent, which is why developing a close-knit bond with your child can help them feel secure enough to share their feelings or concerns as they grow up.
So, on to the games. How can you ensure your kids (and you) are having fun together while gaming?
Healthy competition
Gaming can inspire a sense of healthy competition which is always a necessary skill for children to learn. Playing games helps kids feel able to compete without feeling awful about a loss, show good sportsmanship, care about the rules, and most of all, make sure people want to play with them in future.
Many great competitive games inspire fun and good sportsmanship instead of toxicity, like Mario Party, Nintendo Switch Sports, Human Fall Flat and other digitized board games, for example.
Properly mediated screen time
It’s always important to properly mediate the screen time your children have access to. However, if you can enjoy more wholesome, enjoyable and explorative game sessions with them, they’ll feel satisfied when it’s time to turn the console off.
Many great co-op games for families also allow you to experience a fun story throughout, giving you the chance to explore together rather than to make the parental controls a point of contention throughout your household.
Improving communication and trust
Improving communication is not something that just happens, it takes years of your child listening to conversations in the household, picking up language from their peers, and yes, even watching television. But communication is even more inspiring when you have to complete a task with someone else, and do so efficiently.
This might sound like quite a big ask for a child, especially if they’re young, but when gamified you might be surprised how much fun it can be. This is why cooperative platformers and age-appropriate puzzle games can be so inspiring, because they give you a virtual world rife with the conditions that only capable communications can help your party stride through.
With this advice, you’re sure to see the benefits of bonding with your kids through gaming.
This is a collaborative post.
