377: Parenting a Gamer
with Andrew Fishman LCSW
Listen on Apple Podcasts | Spreaker | Spotify | iHeart Radio
My own kid has told me for years that talking to people online is just easier than talking to them in person. I used to wonder if that was a red flag. Andrew Fishman helped me understand that it actually might be the opposite.
Andrew is a licensed clinical social worker and author of “Parenting a Gamer” who specializes in the impact of video games on mental health. He spent years running group therapy for autistic kids, teens, and adults before focusing his practice on adolescent gamers, many of them neurodivergent.
In this episode, we get into why gaming can feel like the safest, most predictable place in a kid’s whole day, especially for a kid whose brain works differently than the world around them expects. Andrew breaks down why success in a game is actually guaranteed in a way it almost never is in real life, why that fairness matters so much to a kid who’s used to things not going their way, and how the social rules inside a game, like no eye contact required, no reading of body language, can strip away exhausting layers of decoding for an autistic or ADHD kid.
We also talk honestly about safety, the parental controls that actually work, what to do when your kid gets pulled into online conflict because their sense of justice won’t let something slide, and why the meltdown at transition time usually isn’t really about the game at all. Andrew shares the question that changes everything when your kid won’t log off, and a handful of specific games worth knowing about, including one built specifically to help autistic kids practice social skills.
If gaming has ever felt like a battlefield in your house, this conversation will change how you see it. Listen to the full episode now.
For many parents, a child’s hours-long absorption in video games reads as a warning sign. For Andrew Fishman, a clinical social worker who specializes in the intersection of gaming and mental health, it’s usually something closer to relief.
Fishman spent years running group therapy for autistic children, teens, and adults, and now works primarily with adolescent gamers, many of them autistic or otherwise neurodivergent. What he sees in his practice runs counter to a lot of parental fear: gaming is rarely the problem. More often, it’s the place where a struggling kid finally gets a break.
Part of the appeal, Fishman explains, is fairness. Unlike almost any other part of life, a video game guarantees that effort produces results. Practice a skill, follow the rules, adapt to a challenge, and success follows, something no amount of hard work can promise in a job search, a friendship, or a classroom. For a kid whose neurology makes the rest of the world feel unpredictable, that guarantee is powerful. It’s predictable, fun, and accepting, in a way little else is.
The social dimension matters just as much, particularly for autistic kids. In-person interaction demands a constant, largely invisible stream of interpretation: how much eye contact is appropriate, whether a listener is still interested, what a shift in posture might mean. Fishman describes that decoding as a lot of juggling in your head. Gaming strips much of it away. When two players share a specific interest, the usual social guesswork disappears, replaced by a shared, self-selected topic everyone in the space has already agreed to care about. For many kids, that low-stakes environment becomes a rehearsal space for skills they can eventually carry into face-to-face relationships.
None of this means gaming is risk-free, and Fishman is direct about where real problems show up. The clinical markers of a gaming disorder look a lot like other behavioral health concerns: escalating tolerance, abandoning other interests, continued play despite clear consequences, and using games to avoid rather than process difficult emotions. The distinguishing question isn’t how many hours a kid logs. It’s what happens everywhere else in their life. A child with friendships, schoolwork, and other interests intact is very likely okay with gaming. A child whose entire world has narrowed to a screen deserves closer attention.
Transitions off a game are frequently misread as evidence of a bigger problem, when the underlying issue is often something far more mundane and human: stopping mid-task is hard, whether the task is a video game, a work project, or a half-finished craft. What looks like defiance is frequently an unfinished save point, an unresolved plotline, or an unmet emotional need that gaming happened to be meeting. Understanding which one it is matters far more than the screen time number on a parent’s app.
Gaming gives a lot of neurodivergent kids something the rest of the world rarely offers, guaranteed fairness, where effort actually leads to success every time.
The social rules inside a game strip away the exhausting decoding that in-person interaction demands, which is why online connection can feel so much easier for an autistic or ADHD kid than a face-to-face conversation.
A meltdown at transition time is almost never really about defiance, it’s usually an unfinished save point, an unresolved plotline, or a feeling your kid doesn’t have words for yet.
Why video games feel uniquely fair and predictable to a kid whose neurology makes the rest of the world feel unpredictable
How gaming can lower the social decoding load for autistic and ADHD kids, and why that makes online connection feel easier than in-person
The parental control settings that actually protect your kid from strangers, and which popular games still fall short
What to do when your kid gets pulled into a fight with an online troll because their sense of justice won’t let it go
The one question to ask before a transition meltdown, and why it changes what you do next
Andrew Fishman LCSW
His new book, Parenting a Gamer, is a comprehensive guide to all the challenges of parenting a gamer. Andrew has written extensively for Psychology Today, and he has been featured in interviews with outlets including The Wall Street Journal, AJ+ and Fintech Beat among others. Connect with him online at www.videogamehealth.com.
Some of the resources may be affiliate links, meaning I receive a commission (at no cost to you) if you use that link to make a purchase.
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377 Parenting a Gamer with Andrew Fishman
Lightly Edited Transcript
Penny: [00:00:00] Welcome back, everyone. I am really excited to have this conversation around parenting a gamer, because I am a parent of gamers, and I know that a lot of parents really struggle with this. How much is too much? How much is just right? Should they be online? Should they not be online? All of these questions, because we worry about our kids and their health and their safety.
And Andrew Fishman is here to help us untangle all of this and figure out safety, figure out benefits, all that good stuff. So Andrew, will you start by letting everybody know who you are and what you do?
Andrew Fishman, LCSW (He/him): Yeah, thank you for having me. I'm happy to be here. I'm a social worker. I specialize in the impacts of video games on mental health. I've been a therapist for about nine years. I worked at a therapeutic school while getting my master's degree. I spent three-ish years running group therapy for autistic kids, teens, and adults.
Right now [00:01:00] I mostly work with adolescents, especially autistic people and a lot of gamers, a lot of nerds. For a lot of my clients, they come in with their parents, and the parents' main concern is, "My kid spends so much time playing video games. I think they're addicted."
Penny: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Can you talk to us a little bit about that? I think people are really confused about where the line is for addiction.
Andrew Fishman, LCSW (He/him): Mm-hmm. So there is a thing called gaming disorder. If you're familiar, there's a book called the DSM, which is the big tome that has every mental disorder we're aware of in it, and how you diagnose it. Gaming disorder is in there as a provisional, we're-not-sure-if-this-exists diagnosis in the back, sort of a "this has some evidence, we're continuing to study, it might be in the next edition" entry. When they're talking about gaming disorder, they're talking about tolerance, feeling like you need to spend more and more time gaming [00:02:00] to get the same feeling, giving up other activities, loss of interest in things you used to enjoy, continuing to play video games even though it's causing you problems, lying to family members, and then risking other aspects of your life to game more. A classic example I see pretty regularly is people who couldn't pull themselves away from video games in college, ended up not going to class because they needed to play World of Warcraft, or ended up not doing their homework, and they flunked out.
Penny: Yeah. Yeah, we hear those stories a lot.
Andrew Fishman, LCSW (He/him): Mm-hmm.
Penny: That's really tough. And I want to backtrack a little bit and talk about your perspective on gaming. Are there benefits? What are the drawbacks? What are the pitfalls? Thinking as a parent myself, how do we navigate this thing that is here?
Technology is here. It's not going anywhere. Our kids are exposed to it now [00:03:00] at school, everywhere. So how do we help them learn how to find that balance that you were just talking about?
Andrew Fishman, LCSW (He/him): Mm-hmm. So the first thing I would say is that video games are an art form like any other. It's like books, it's like movies, it's like going to a museum sometimes. There are trashy games that I think are kind of meaningless, and then there are really beautiful games that are as impactful and wonderful as any TV show I've ever seen, any book I've ever read.
The narratives are amazing. The gameplay is fun and exciting. There's a lot of social benefits. We can get into all of these things. I think one of the things that draws most of my clients to video games, and I think this will resonate with a lot of your listeners, is that video games are fair. More fair [00:04:00] than any other part of your life. If you practice and work really hard, and you follow the rules, and you adapt, you're gonna win. You can succeed in this game, where success is not guaranteed in any other part of your life, for the rest of your life. You could do everything right and not get a job.
You could do everything right and flunk out of college because it wasn't right for you. There are aspects of interpersonal relationships that are just beyond your control. Video games are uniquely safe in that way, that it's predictable, and it's fun, and it's accepting.
Penny: So many good things in there, right? That predictability, for a lot of our neurodivergent kids, they crave that. But also the social aspect. My own son, who's about to turn 24, he talks all the time, and has since he was little, about the fact that interacting with people is so much easier online than it is in person.
And so that pulls our kids in that direction. How do we help them [00:05:00] throttle that maybe, learn where boundaries should be?
Andrew Fishman, LCSW (He/him): Yeah.
Penny: Where limits should be.
Andrew Fishman, LCSW (He/him): So I think what a lot of people find reassuring is that most people never develop a true problem with video games.
Penny: Mm-hmm.
Andrew Fishman, LCSW (He/him): There's a sort of push and pull. Sometimes I spend more if I'm really into a game. Sometimes I spend less because there's nothing hooking me at the moment. And for most people, it doesn't really impact their wellbeing one way or the other. It's just another fact of life. I think the last statistic I read was that something like 91% of teen boys play video games regularly, and 91% of boys are not being impacted negatively by this activity. For most, it's just fun.
Penny: Right.
Andrew Fishman, LCSW (He/him): And so I always encourage people to look at the other parts of their life also. Does your kid have other interests? Does your kid have a social life? Is your kid doing well at school? Are they doing extracurricular activities? Are they learning a musical instrument?
If this isn't the only thing they're [00:06:00] doing, and they have a well-rounded life, their use of video games is probably fine. It's probably just a harmless way to relax after a long day.
Penny: Mm-hmm. Yeah. I'm just thinking about how much of a struggle that still is for a lot of parents. And I think, tell me if I'm wrong, but it feels like it's a generational difference too, and that's where a lot of parents are getting caught up. We older parents who didn't grow up with gaming, didn't grow up with cell phones and computers in our hands, it feels so different that it feels sort of threatening.
Andrew Fishman, LCSW (He/him): Right.
Penny: That's kind of where my head is going as we're talking. I think younger parents who've grown up with it maybe don't worry as much about it. Do you sense that too?
Andrew Fishman, LCSW (He/him): Oh, absolutely. And there's actually some evidence that even [00:07:00] scientists are subject to that kind of bias, that researchers who don't like video games or didn't grow up with them are more likely to criticize and see them as harmful than people who grew up with them themselves and know more about the games.
Penny: Yeah. So we've established that they're most often not harmful.
Andrew Fishman, LCSW (He/him): Mm-hmm.
Penny: There are two directions to go now. One is about safety, because that's definitely a concern, and also about benefits. So what makes more sense first?
Andrew Fishman, LCSW (He/him): To talk to your viewers for a second, I wrote a book about this subject. The first topic of the book, the first third, is sort of a primer, 101, and then also what are the benefits. So from that perspective, I think that makes sense.
Penny: Yeah, absolutely, and we'll link the book up for everyone too.
Andrew Fishman, LCSW (He/him): Oh, thank you. So the benefits of gaming, first off, [00:08:00] the same benefits that you would experience from any work of art. It increases your experience of the world. It just makes your world bigger. The more stories you're exposed to, I think the better person you end up being, the more empathy you have. It's hard to describe what art does to you, but I think it just makes you a whole person.
Penny: Mm-hmm.
Andrew Fishman, LCSW (He/him): There are also social benefits, as we talked about. Any time you can connect with other people, even if it's over a shared game, especially if it's over a shared game, it's just a nice way to spend time and to become a more interesting, well-rounded person.
Social time is always good. For autistic people, I think you alluded to this earlier, it feels like a safer, easier place to socialize. One of the ways I think about that is that there's a lot that neurotypical people take for granted in social settings. How much eye contact is too much? How do I know if this person is really interested [00:09:00] in what I have to say? Can I talk about my special interest? Have I said too much about it? Has this person's body language indicated that they want to end this conversation? What are their facial expressions telling me? Although autistic people can often do a lot of those things, it's a lot of juggling in your head.
It's a lot of trying to remember, "Wait, shoot, their feet are pointed toward the door, and they said this..." And then, "Well, okay, shoot, do I pivot the conversation? Have I said too much about myself?" A lot of those barriers go away in a game, where if your special interest is Minecraft and you are playing Minecraft, everyone in that room has self-selected to hear about Minecraft.
Everyone is interested in it. You don't have to worry about eye contact. You can't even make eye contact in this space. You don't have to worry about body language. It's easier to script socially. So it's both its own good thing, and also a good stepping stone, a place to practice social relationships that you can then take out into the real world.
Penny: [00:10:00] Talk to us a little bit about the safety around that, because I know a lot of parents worry, and this was a huge concern of mine too, that we don't know the other people they're interacting with in that space. And some of them are predators. There's no dancing around that.
Andrew Fishman, LCSW (He/him): Oh, absolutely.
Penny: Most of them, I think, are not, right? It's not the majority. But how do we keep our kids safe in those spaces? Do we have to be there with them to do that?
Andrew Fishman, LCSW (He/him): Right. There are two pieces to this that I would bring up. One is that there are parental controls in most, if not all, games, or settings within the menu if it's not a direct parental control, and that's to limit who's allowed to talk to your kid.
Penny: Okay.
Andrew Fishman, LCSW (He/him): In Fortnite, just as an example that I think does it really well, there's a sliding bar in the settings menu. If you go to communications, or [00:11:00] connections, I forget what it's called, you go to this one area, and there's a sliding bar that says "Everyone can talk to me," or if you slide it a little less, "Only my friends and the people I'm currently on a team with can talk to me." Slide it a little further, "Only my friends can talk to me," and then further, "No one can talk to me." There are options in all these games, from "I just want to play this game and I don't want anyone to hear what I'm saying, and I don't want to hear what anybody else is saying," all the way up to "Anyone, including those predators, can talk to me." That most extreme option, anyone can talk to me, should be off in every game that kids are playing.
Penny: Sure.
Andrew Fishman, LCSW (He/him): With Roblox in particular, as the most notorious example, although they changed it recently, and I've heard mixed reviews, it used to be that you could only set it to "everyone can talk to me" or "nobody can talk to me." There was no friends-only option. So if your 10-year-old kid wants to talk to other 10-year-olds from his class and they're [00:12:00] all talking in Roblox, there was no way to also disallow 50-year-olds from another state from talking to them. So if you have the option, I would go into the game settings of your kids' favorite games and just turn that option off for strangers to talk to them. Then, to your second point, I think the best thing parents can do is play with their kids, just to see what's going on, to spend some positive time with them. It's a good bonding experience. There are a lot of benefits to playing with your kids, and one of them is to monitor. If you keep hearing your kid talking on his headset, are they talking to other kids you would approve of, or are they talking to people you wouldn't? You can't make good decisions if you don't have enough information.
Penny: Yeah. We really need to engage with them about what they're doing online, have those conversations and know what's going on. Yeah. It's so good to hear about those parental controls, because when my kid was 10, those didn't exist.
Andrew Fishman, LCSW (He/him): Mm-hmm.
Penny: We were just [00:13:00] trying to figure out how to limit who they were with and what was going on, and it was much more difficult then.
So I know parental controls have come a long way now.
Andrew Fishman, LCSW (He/him): They also just make for a more pleasant experience generally. I still turn on some of those settings myself. I was playing Grand Theft Auto, which has an online version where you're playing with other people. I played it for maybe three minutes before it sounded like school children yelling racial slurs. And I thought to myself, "I just don't want any of that in my life. I'm done." I went into the settings right away, turned it off, much more pleasant experience. I'd turn it off at any age. I think it's generally a bad idea.
[Note: a brief audio dropout occurred here during recording.]
Penny: So glad we can edit. Yeah, let me make a note, I've gotta figure out why that's happening.
Andrew Fishman, LCSW (He/him): Yeah.
Penny: There was something I was gonna say right then too. I lost it.
Andrew Fishman, LCSW (He/him): I was talking about the little voices yelling racial slurs, and I just turned it off, and I'm not interested in hearing this kind of nonsense at all.
Penny: Yeah. A lot of our neurodivergent kids have this really strong sense of justice. This was a big thing with my own kid gaming and online. When people weren't behaving themselves, [00:15:00] he would engage to try to get them to be better, to do better, and it was a real battle to get him to not engage in that stuff, to just let it go, move on.
I don't know if you have any words of wisdom around that, but I found that to be, and so many parents I talk to in coaching say the same, "This sense of justice just kills us."
Andrew Fishman, LCSW (He/him): Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's so hard. What you're describing is very real, the sense of justice, this sense that there is a right way to do things. And often they're right, those people are acting badly.
Penny: Mm-hmm.
Andrew Fishman, LCSW (He/him): And you want them to stop, and you can't.
Penny: Mm.
Andrew Fishman, LCSW (He/him): And that's the hardest part for a lot of people, that the people online who are saying the worst things are doing it for fun. They're doing it because they enjoy the fight. They enjoy the attention it gives them. And the only way [00:16:00] to really stop them is to not give them that attention. Just report them, block them, move on.
Penny: Yeah.
Andrew Fishman, LCSW (He/him): I know that feels like not enough. It feels like you should convince them otherwise, show them the error of their ways. But the reality is that doesn't change anybody's mind, ever, especially on the internet.
Just telling them they're wrong and yelling at them doesn't do anything if that person isn't acting in good faith. This isn't a debate. This is a troll on the internet. So the best tool you have, as someone who cares about justice and cares about people acting right, is to block them and move on. And if enough people do that, it stops being fun for them, and they stop.
Penny: Hmm. Yeah, so eventually that can work. That "I need a resolution right now" thing gets you stuck, you know? It's hard to get at least my kid to move on from that. It was like, "No, I'm gonna make sure they know they're [00:17:00] being hateful." Yeah. Can we talk a little bit about that power struggle around gaming?
This is something I think every parent probably knows at this point, if your kid's old enough to be gaming, especially when we're asking them to stop. When it's time to transition to do something else, sometimes we see the most surprising and challenging behavior out of our kids, and I think we interpret that as, well, then gaming isn't a good thing for them.
If they can't transition, then we just need to not do it at all.
Andrew Fishman, LCSW (He/him): Yeah.
Penny: Where do you fall in that debate? What is the evidence telling you about what's going on there?
Andrew Fishman, LCSW (He/him): Well, first I'd say that transitions are hard, and [00:18:00] they've always been hard, and games are no exception. If your kid is really into music, maybe playing the saxophone, drums, and transitioning them away from that toward bedtime, or toward a shower at the end of the day, or toward homework, is gonna be a struggle too. Games are no exception to that, so I don't think they're uniquely bad in that way, transitions are just hard. The other thing I'd encourage parents to look for and listen for is when you say, "It's time to go to bed, to turn the games off for the night," what do they say is the reason they want to keep playing?
Penny: Hmm.
Andrew Fishman, LCSW (He/him): There are different categories, and different ways you can respond as a parent based on what they identify as the problem. If it's, "We're in the middle of a round and my friends are gonna lose," that's a different problem, a different kid, and a different solution than "I just need one more minute, then I'm gonna finish, I'm almost there, I'm almost at the end of the level," versus "I need to finish or I'm not gonna be able to do this thing anymore." One of the harder reasons is if they're playing to dull [00:19:00] emotional pain, and the rest of the world is just more difficult, and they don't want to go back to it. But the point is, each of those categories requires a different response from you, and you can't know how to respond if you don't know what the problem is. So I think for most parents, the first and most important step is to stay curious, stay calm, and talk to the kid about what was actually happening in that moment.
"What made it so hard for you, on top of it just being a transition?"
Penny: Mm-hmm. And they're not always gonna be able to have that conversation in that moment. A lot of times we have to wait. I remember realizing that for my own kid, it was, "I'm at a point where I can't save. Everything I've been doing this whole time is gonna be lost if I don't have five more minutes to save."
And I started talking to parents about, imagine you're watching this whodunit movie, and right when they're about to tell you [00:20:00] who actually did it, somebody turns it off and says, "Sorry, we gotta go do something else." You'd be upset too.
Andrew Fishman, LCSW (He/him): Yes. And if it's truly like, "If I needed five more minutes, then I would happily turn it off, because then all the ends will be tied up and I'll know who did it and I can move on." The saving is a big one too. If I'd been working on a proposal for work for an hour, and for whatever reason couldn't save my progress until I finished this paragraph, you couldn't stop me from finishing that paragraph.
That's a tremendous amount of work and effort put in, and it's the same thing for a lot of games. Sometimes you have to reach a checkpoint to save.
Penny: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So for the kids who you give five more minutes, and now they want another five minutes, another 10 minutes, just one more minute,
Andrew Fishman, LCSW (He/him): Mm-hmm.
Penny: is that where we're starting to see more of a problem we need to address, maybe?
Andrew Fishman, LCSW (He/him): I think that's [00:21:00] certainly one sign. For those kids, there are some games that just work against you in that way. Some games are designed so that you're always five minutes away from something,
Penny: Mm-hmm.
Andrew Fishman, LCSW (He/him): they overlap all these goals so that as soon as you finish one, you think, "All right, well, as soon as I reach the town, then I'm gonna turn it off." And then you get to the town and somebody goes, "Oh, can you do this one more thing for me? We're five minutes." And you're like, "Okay, well, surely now that I can do this, I can..." Then it's five more minutes. I wrote about this in the book.
I've fallen into this trap too. There's a game called Skyrim where they give you 300 different quests, and all of them only take a couple minutes each, and they overlap, so when you've just finished one, you're also almost finished with the next one. And three hours go by before you're realizing it.
Penny: Mm.
Andrew Fishman, LCSW (He/him): It's now, and I thought, "Shoot, I was supposed to go to bed. How did that happen?"
Penny: Yeah.
Andrew Fishman, LCSW (He/him): It's an easy trap to fall into, even as adults, even as people who know better. Some of the games just work against you. So if that's your kid, [00:22:00] maybe talk about the fact that that specific game is causing more problems than it's helping for you.
Penny: Mm-hmm. That segues right into the next thing I wanted to ask you, which is, can you list some specific games that you find help build skills, that have benefits? Or do you have some favorites?
Andrew Fishman, LCSW (He/him): Oh gosh, I like so many games. The first one that comes to mind is Minecraft,
Penny: Mm-hmm.
Andrew Fishman, LCSW (He/him): single-player or the co-op version of it, as a way to practice planning ahead, as a way to be creative. I'm not sure how much you and your listeners know about Minecraft, so I'll back up a second.
Minecraft is an extraordinarily popular game, and it's very creative. You're dropped into what's called a sandbox world, where you can do whatever you want. You can create and destroy parts of the environment. You can raise [00:23:00] animals. You can go hunt monsters. You can go build a building. And you have a tremendous amount of creative power over this world. So people use it to recreate buildings from their neighborhood. They use it to build their dream mansion. They use it to raise livestock and create a little farm to gather resources. And some of them want to gather the best things, and then delve into the mines to figure out what's down there. There's a lot of forethought and planning that's just naturally built into this game, where if I want to build this mansion of my dreams, I need to not only figure out what I want it to look like and then execute, I need to gather the resources that will allow me to do that. I need to go get wood if I want to build a log cabin. So there's a lot of potential in this game.
Penny: Mm-hmm.
Andrew Fishman, LCSW (He/him): I think most directly, that's a game I would suggest has benefits. There's another one I mention in the book, [00:24:00] it's called Balatro, where it's...
It looks like poker, it looks like gambling, but it's all statistics and numbers and probabilities, and you're trying to get the highest score by, gosh, it's complicated and hard to describe. It's a lot of math, the Fibonacci sequence, multipliers on multipliers on exponents, repeated exponents.
It gets really complicated really fast. I don't know, I could go on, but I think you get the point. There's a lot of thought and skill involved, and ways to view them as beneficial in that way.
Penny: Mm-hmm. I know...
Andrew Fishman, LCSW (He/him): Actually, sorry, there's one more game that just came to mind.
Penny: Yeah.
Andrew Fishman, LCSW (He/him): I'm not sure if this is actually released yet or not, but I was given early access to a game called Ava, A-V-A, which is designed for autistic kids to practice social skills.
Penny: Wow.
Andrew Fishman, LCSW (He/him): You're this little girl named Ava, and you're flying around this [00:25:00] world, and you're talking to people, and you're guided through social scripts and conversations, where you talk to someone and then have multiple choice, what do you want to say to them next? If you say something rude, the person reacts poorly, and Ava thinks to herself, "Oh gosh, I really said that too much too soon, didn't I? I should probably try again." It goes through some of the really easy mistakes we all fall into, and gently guides you into other ways you could handle various interactions.
It's designed by autistic people for autistic people. Very cool.
Penny: Sounds amazing. Yeah.
Andrew Fishman, LCSW (He/him): Yeah.
Penny: Really amazing, because they're getting that feedback,
Andrew Fishman, LCSW (He/him): Mm-hmm.
Penny: in real time, without maybe that social...
Andrew Fishman, LCSW (He/him): Mm-hmm.
Penny: not danger, but, you know, the stakes. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Amazing. There are a million more things we could talk about, and we're [00:26:00] already running short on time. Is there anything we haven't talked about that you feel is really, really important for parents to hear right now?
Andrew Fishman, LCSW (He/him): Um, yes. I think the biggest takeaway I really want people to have is to play alongside your kids. This is probably going to be uncomfortable for a lot of people, especially if you didn't grow up with the games. It's gonna be strange to play with your kid in a way where you're gonna be bad at it for a while.
Penny: Mm-hmm.
Andrew Fishman, LCSW (He/him): Or watch. You might just want to sit next to them while they show you all around their virtual world. But it's such a good way to bond, to connect, to learn more, to learn what the language is that you can use. If you know, for example, that your kid does these things called raids, and maybe you don't really know what they are, but you know they take 30 minutes each, and that you can't save until the end of it, that informs a lot of your parental decisions and gives you the language to communicate more [00:27:00] effectively with your kid.
You can say, "Look, I know you're in the middle of a raid, but we need to turn this off right now because Grandma's coming over in three minutes." That's more effective than just, "You need to turn it off." Just acknowledging that,
Penny: Sure.
Andrew Fishman, LCSW (He/him): and using the kid's language, helps bridge those gaps.
Penny: Yeah, absolutely. My kids wanted me to play, and then they were like, "You're really holding me back. Maybe I don't need you here," because I'm not a gamer. And so...
Andrew Fishman, LCSW (He/him): for them, though...
Penny: yeah, to be the authority and the one who knows how to do something better than mom, absolutely, completely, yes. Tell everybody where they can find you online and where they can find the book, Parenting a Gamer.
Andrew Fishman, LCSW (He/him): Sure. My website is videogamehealth.com. You can see a lot of articles and things I've written there. You can find the book anywhere books are sold. It's called Parenting a Gamer: Help Your Child Build Healthy Habits, Make Positive Choices, and Find Balance in Virtual [00:28:00] Worlds.
Penny: And thank you for focusing on this. Thank you for helping us navigate this. It is a challenge for so many families, and I think understanding what the benefits are, where the problem areas are, what we can do to make sure this is healthy, that's how we alleviate some of the worry and the anxiety we have around it, and our kids can then have a better experience.
So I really appreciate that this is some of the world you're doing your work in, and I was just so happy to talk to you and happy to have you here. I really appreciate it.
Andrew Fishman, LCSW (He/him): Thank you so much. Let's do it again sometime.
Penny: Yeah. I will put all of Andrew's links in the show notes for everyone, and I hope to see you next time. Take good care.
hey there!
I help stuck and struggling parents (educators, too) make the pivots necessary to unlock success and joy for neurodivergent kids and teens, themselves, and their families. I’m honored to be part of your journey!
Hello!
I'm Penny Williams.
Host of Beautifully Complex. I help stuck and struggling parents (educators, too) make the pivots necessary to unlock success and joy for neurodivergent kids and teens, themselves, and their families. I'm honored to be part of your journey!
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