My Son Loves Fortnite, But I Don't Think He Likes It
My son can’t stop thinking about Fortnite. I can’t help but think the game is just too good. Not at being fun, but at making you want to think about it. He does enjoy it sometimes, but a lot of the time it’s frustrating. The amount of time that he thinks about it compared to how much fun he has when playing it is what has started to bother me.
He can spend hours and hours and hours looking at emotes and skins. He daydreams about future games and recalls memorable ones from the past. He researches mice and keyboards or how he can upgrade his controller. He researches how to get more frames per second out of his steam deck or the PC.
It reminds me of when people have a bad habit they know they want to kick, but they just can’t. Hell, I wanted to want to lose weight for soooooo long, but I just couldn’t do it. That seems like what could be happening here. If he could look at this from the outside he might wish Fortnite could be deleted from his brain.
It kills me because if he put this much effort and thought into his other interests he would probably be the best in the city at skateboarding or making recipes he found from youtube.
I don’t know what to do. Surrendering isn’t an option for me right now. All I know to do is to keep trying new things. Here are some of the ways we’ve handled screens in the past:
45 min of screen time per day
Screen time is between 4:30 and 5:30
Unlimited screens (an experiment during the pandemic)
60 min of screen time per day
Screen time is 3 hours on Friday and 2 (non-Fortnite) hours on Sunday
The reason we started the Friday/Sunday rule is to see if some distance from it can let his mind get bored enough to do the other things he loves like cooking, practicing something on his skateboard. I feel like it has been working fairly well, but he’s not happy with it.
His newest proposal is interesting because it’s almost completely cutting out Fortnite. He wants to go back to daily screen time, but Fortnite would only be played if he want to a sleepover with his friends. I don’t think this is a good option, but just the fact he’s proposing this makes me think he’s starting to understand the bad ratio that Fortnite provides (amount of time:amount of fun).
A question that I posed to myself: “You let your kids play far less screens than the average parent. If it were the case that parents didn’t let their kids watch screens how would that affect your decision on screen time?” I don’t like that the answer is that if others didn’t do it I wouldn’t feel so much pressure to say yes to it.
Why don’t I just say zero screens:
I’m worried my kids will be too out of the loop to fit in.
I worry that when they are adults they won’t have learned self control.
I’m worried they will be angry at me.
Good video games are so fucking good. (Why can’t they just play those!?)
I want them to have fun.
Yeah, those reasons aren’t the best. I see that. What am I going to do? I’m not giving up. I’m going to keep experimenting, thinking, and asking others. If you have had success with a technique please share it with me.
