Q&A – Video Games and a Child’s Heart

Lindsay wrote in with a question:

I have an 8-year-old son who LOVES computer and video games (pretty much anything audio-visual). He's very young and we have very strict guidelines on what and how much he takes part in these things. But I feel like I am battling for my son's heart in this matter. I (and my husband) am looking for some encouragement and guidance in how to turn his HEART from loving and longing for worldly things, to loving and longing for the Lord.

Many parents of young (and not-so-young!) children are confronted with the challenge of “shepherding a child’s heart” when it comes to video games.

As it happens, my dad answered a similar question awhile back, and my brother, Chad, posted his answer on the Sovereign Grace blog last week.

When it comes to idolatry of video games, Dad explains, you want to combine guidelines and restrictions with purposeful study of Scripture and a heart softened by your own sinful tendencies:

I want to try to introduce my son to a study that isn’t correction specific to an occasion. I want to study the heart, I want to study anger, I want to study idolatry, unrelated to an occasion where I am bringing discipline, so that the study hopefully can have the most effect. I want to engage in a study from Scripture. I want to choose age-appropriate material. I want to choose appropriate passages.

And then my study with my son is supplemented by stories from my life, because I do the same thing. I don’t cry anymore like a child but I know how to cry in adult ways. I want my child to know that no matter what the category, I can identify…
 
By humbling myself, I hope I make it easier for him to receive from me, so that when I say “Listen,” it’s not “Listen to your self-righteous father who is angry at you because he doesn’t understand why it requires this kind of attention to help you to see how stupid a video game is.”

It is too easy for me to view my son’s form of idolatry as childish, but in essence, at root, there is no difference between our idolatries. His expression is consistent with a 12 year old, mine is consistent with a 56 year old, but in essence it’s no different. Therefore I must make sure my heart is softened by my own sinful tendencies.

Read the whole thing. And from our archives you can learn how two moms handle video games in their homes.