The Parental Case for Playing Video Games

When I was in elementary school, back in the 8-bit Nintendo days, every once in a while my father, older sister, and I would get together and try to play our favorite video game—Super Mario Bros. 3—straight through without warping. We would attempt the feat as one, unified Mario, each passing the controller to the next person whenever someone died or completed a level. We had to strategize together about our best paths through the obstacles and the optimal usage of items, and when it was time for lunch or dinner we would pause the game but leave the TV on, because it wasn’t possible to save our progress. These are perhaps some of my favorite childhood memories.

So when my daughter was younger and begging for a game console of her own, as a Super Mario fan, I really had no objections. I envisioned us on the couch together playing through all the levels of Kirby and the Forgotten Land, employing the same level of teamwork my family used on our Super Mario Saturdays. (I’m grateful, though, that we wouldn’t have to do it all in one shot anymore—thank you, SD cards, for the ability to save games!)

As a parent, though, I’m told I have to be wary of letting my daughter have too much screen time. Video games, other parents warn on social media and in group chats, will make her sedentary and smooth-brained, and keep her shut off in her room isolated, lonely, and depressed.

But is any of that actually true? None of it seems to line up with my own experiences gaming. In fact, last time I got a visit from my father, who’s now in his 70s, he still played Nintendo with us—three generations on one couch, each trying to best the others in Mario Party. And games have only gotten better, with more involved storytelling, deeper character development, and more sophisticated puzzles, since my side-scrolling adventures. How can playing them be across-the-board bad?

I set out to look into what research really says about kids, games, and gaming, and I learned it’s not really helpful for caregivers to paint every activity that takes place on an electronic device with the same scary “screen time” brush. And while there are definite traps to watch out for when letting kids play video games—in-game purchases, for example, along with unrestricted communication with other players, and a temptation to play instead of sleep—researchers showed me that there’s actually a great many benefits to kids playing video games they might not get from other, more passive on-screen activities like scrolling, posting, or watching shows or videos. (More than one researcher even compared video games favorably to reading books—which is equally stationary and up-close, but a lot less interactive—but the parent group chat isn’t ready for that yet.) And, based on their data, here’s why I’ve gone from believing that not only is it okay to let kids play video games, but adults should actually encourage kids to play.

I can’t say my 10-year-old and I never yell at each other during co-op games, but in the end we find a way to work together.

It’s an accusation I’ve heard even in my 8-bit days: Video games will rot your brain. And while the aphorism persists to this day, it’s actually the opposite that’s true. Kids who play video games actually outperform non-gamers on cognitive tests, research shows. But the idea that video games are bad for kids’ brains is so entrenched that, even when I told friends what I learned while I was working on this article, they didn’t believe me. (“Hmm yeah I’m going to go with no on that,” my college roommate, now a guidance counselor, texted me when I told her what I’d found out. But maybe it’s because I could beat her at every game except Dr. Mario.)

But that is the conclusion drawn from a massive longitudinal study, called the ABCD Study, which tracked 12,000 kids across 21 sites in the United States. “Video gamers outperformed the non-gamers on a working memory task and also on a response inhibition task,” says co-investigator Bader Chaarani, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Vermont. “So they’re faster on these cognitive tasks, and they’re also more accurate.”

He’s even observed a higher IQ in moderate gamers, though a causal relationship hasn’t been proven. “That's something parents love to hear more about,” he adds. “They say, ‘Oh, are you telling me my kid is smarter if they play video games?’ And I say, ‘No, I'm not saying that yet. We're looking into it.’"

Even games that parents might not love for their content, including shooting games like Fortnite, require rapid-fire, real-time strategy, planning, and execution. “These are fast and highly competitive games,” Dr. Chaarani says. “They’re engaging the brain at every single second. When I was their age, I was like, ‘Oh, I click here, then I click here.’ And now they’re clicking 100,000 things and building and shooting—it's impressive. That engages multiple cognitive functions in the brain simultaneously, and they're doing this for hours every day.”

Dr. Charaani has also looked at MRI scans to see what’s really going on when kids are gaming, and learned that gaming affects brains on a physiological level. “We’re seeing that there are changes in what we call neural activation in areas that are mainly involved in memory, problem-solving, logic, and perception,” he says. “That can totally explain why we’re seeing outperformance in these groups of gamers.”

Of course, the picture isn’t entirely rosy: Dr. Chaarani notes that extreme amounts of gaming—which he says is three or more hours per day—is associated with higher incidence of depression and attention issues.

But that might be a symptom and not a cause. “People who have neurodivergence or depression may be more drawn to video games, because they might feel isolated in real life, and they can feel connected in video games,” says Mary Ballard, Ph.D., a professor in the Department of Psychology at Appalachian State University. “Unless you do a longitudinal study starting pretty early, that’s going to be really hard to ascertain at a causal level.”

While my generation used to gather around issues of Nintendo Power and study the maps for The Legend of Zelda, kids today are spending their time actually building out their own digital lands together in games like Minecraft. “There’s a real cooperative element to developing these kinds of worlds that they’re playing in,” Dr. Ballard says. “So you've got both the cognitive and the social aspects of this kind of play going along and developing together. And then they have to think out step-by-step what they’re going to do next, so there's a lot of evidence that video games are good for sequential planning skills.”

I know how the idyllic version of the way games promote social development plays out, which involves kids sitting side-by-side doing “couch co-ops” and working together solving problems in the same spaces. But it doesn’t actually have to look like that for kids to experience the benefits. (And it often doesn’t: For starters, Dr. Ballard says her research shows that, unlike in my family, gamers actually liked playing against each other more than they liked playing with each other. It’s the competition that draws them in, just like it would if they were playing basketball with friends.)

The truth is, kids don’t even have to be in the same room together or play together at all to feel connected by gaming. “Games have an immense capacity for social bonding even if you play games at night by yourself, and then go to school the next day,” says Nick Bowman, Ph.D., a professor and Ph.D. director at the SI Newhouse School of Public Communications. “It's the playground talk. ‘How far did you get in level five? Did you figure out how to beat that boss? How do you craft this? Let's share recipes.’”

Dr. Bowman says this is called “participatory culture,” where games are now so mainstream they’re just a part of the cultural zeitgeist. And gaming is pervasive; according to Pew Research Center, 85% of U.S. teens report playing video games, 89% report playing them with other people as opposed to alone, and about half of gamers (47%) say they’ve made a friend online through video games.

“We find that gaming facilitates friendships,” Dr. Bowman says. “It’s something that people who know each other face-to-face do when they can't be face-to-face. We find a lot of intergenerational play, which is basically fancy talk for family co-playing. And we find a lot of gaming for nostalgia, so especially older gamers who are trying to return back to a younger self. So at the end of the day, as a media psychologist, and as somebody who is deeply concerned about wellbeing, there is just so much evidence that gaming contributes to wellbeing, and the only evidence we have that it hurts wellbeing is at the extreme edges.”

Some gamers actively use video games to help with their emotional regulation; a 2025 study said that “narrative involvement, social interaction, and escapism” caused video-game players to turn to gaming as a way to cope with stress. The cozy gamers curling up with their Animal Crossing islands are actually onto something—and the more tools we give kids for de-stressing, the better, I say.

What about the idea that video games open doors in the mind where darkness can seep in, desensitizing kids to violence and other antisocial behavior?

Dr. Ballard says there just isn’t a lot of evidence to support that. “I think if they’ve been well socialized and don’t have a lot of other risk factors, playing violent games is not going to cause problems,” Dr. Ballard says. “Levels of high aggression can be tied to a lot of things, and so if kids are kind of aggressive, you might want to moderate what they’re playing a little bit more, because it may be a factor that increases risk if there’s already risk.”

This doesn’t mean that caregivers shouldn’t look at the age-appropriateness of each game. Dr. Ballard says kids under 7 shouldn’t really be exposed to violence other than the most cartoonish, Super Mario kind of violence, while kids 7 to 12 should be okay with mild violence. “After 12 or 13, you kind of lose some of the control over what kids are doing anyway,” she says.

That doesn’t mean that gaming spaces are always a social utopia. “Just like in sports, sometimes it's rough,” Dr. Bowman says. “Sometimes it's toxic. You're gonna have times where, just like how baseball players call each other names, you hop into World of Warcraft and you'll call each other names.” Pew notes that 41% of teen gamers say they’ve been called an offensive name, 12% have been physically threatened, and 8% have been sent unwanted sexually explicit messages.

But that’s just another reason why it’s great to play together, so parents can see what’s going on and model how to be a good sport or a gracious loser without bullying—or have help handling difficult situations if they do arise. “A lot of negative effects of gaming are because people don't know how to process information,” Dr. Bowman says. “They get bullied and no one's there. They lose and they get frustrated and no one's there. So I would say definitely pay attention to content, but pay more attention to how your children are responding to the content.” Then, they’ll also have built up problem-solving tools and resilience they can draw on when some of these conflicts happen in real life, away from screens.

I can’t say my sister and I are always on the same page as adults because we played video games together growing up, and I won’t claim that my daughter and I never have disputes because we learned teamwork from Kirby. But we have had some good times, and if it makes us a little happier, stronger, and wiser, I’m not going to feel bad about letting my daughter fire up her Switch, even if it does have a screen.

Our love of gaming has even spilled over into IRL experiences, like a trip to Super Nintendo World.

• Keeping the body healthy comes first. Kids need exercise, and they need good sleep. If gaming interferes with these—or other have-to-dos, like schoolwork—then there’s a problem.
• The bigger the screen, the better. Playing together on the family TV, where you can see what kids are playing and what’s going on, is better than letting them do who-knows-what on personal tablets.
• Look out for traps like in-app purchases, pay-to-skip features, freemiums, or loot boxes. “If the game can only be won by you putting money into the game, it's no longer really a game,” Dr. Bowman says.
• Aim for the sweet spot in terms of time spent. Dr. Chaarani says that an hour per day is probably the optimal amount. “It seems like it gives you the benefits, but you don't see the negative outcomes on mental health,” he says.
• Get in the game. “Parents would be surprised how much co-playing and being involved in the hobby helps you understand what they're doing,” Dr. Bowman says. Besides, it’s all in good fun—until your 10-year-old gets good enough at Smash Bros. to annihilate you every time.