He is edgy, quick to anger. We speak and explain control measures, our reasons and agrees, then when the limit’s reached—he asks for more again.
It’s only a screen, virtual world and games, but it messes with his mind. He’s the same with his phone (as I often am, too, as well). His friends don’t have limits, he tells. This may be true, but we are not their parents. We are his.
It’s not that we don’t want him to enjoy time and experiences with friends. It’s that we want to break a mental, physical, and chemical dependence that comes from fix and hit of games and screens.
All of virtual reality and modern pocket-media technology is designed for addiction—to attract, draw, and keep us fixed to the products that they offer detaching and often becoming irrelevant and ghosts in our true lives and worlds.
As parents, we want him to find enjoyments, interests, and passions outside of virtual wormholes and pocket screens.
It is hard enough at forty to identify (or admit) when we are losing ourselves into distractions, diversions, and irrelevance of screens. I can’t imagine it at thirteen.
Technology is a modern cigarette hooking its lifetime consumers to the detriment of living. At least with a cigarette, you meet people face to face when partaking in the vice. VR and phone games and apps, we are isolated in nothingness and falseness.
Maybe cancer is better than the existence of a non-life. Confrontation of death at least inclines one into awareness of its gift and blessing. Existence in a non-life, it remains in idling of away.
He’s going through withdrawal, but it’s better to fight and break it now than to lose him for a lifetime.
On screen now as publish for read and checking apps in wondering who sees, aware I should lay it down—I’m working through the same.