Many parents hold to the implicit understanding that video games are little more than a frivolous waste of time. Yesterday The Huffington Post reported on Jane McGonigal’s talk at the National Association for College Admission Counseling conference. McGonigal argued that video games should not be seen as essentially harmful to children, but she did not stop at simply returning video games to a neutral, okay-in-moderation, sort of argument. Indeed, according to the report, she argued that video games have demonstrative positive effects on the children who play them.

On one level, I find this kind of discussion to be largely positive. Part of technological progress involves the initial skepticism, slow acceptance, and eventual reification of particular artistic and creative forms. It happened with the novel in the 18th and 19th centuries. Novels were initially seen as a silly waste of time, appropriate only for weak-minded women, but this attitude shifted until novels came to be seen as one of the highest literary art forms. So I’m happy to see that an organization that is ostensibly unrelated to the world of video games, and therefore has no vested interest in promoting video games as valuable, is inviting a speaker like McGonigal.

And yet, when it comes to my own daughter, I find myself so easily reverting to the kind of problematic tactics that my parents used. Why can’t you play video games all day? Because it’s not good for you–it rots your brain and makes you lazy. Okay, so maybe I don’t use terms quite so harsh, but the temptation is certainly there. The problem, I’ve discovered, is in translating the values that McGonigal champions, and which I share, to my children in a way that also communicates restraint and moderation.

Right now the plan we have our schedule set up so that she can only play on the weekends. This was the routine that I had growing up, and it seemed to work well. The problem that I’ve been having comes when it’s time to turn something off. Rose isn’t prone to huge temper tantrums, but she often expresses a palpable dissatisfaction with not being allowed to play for extended periods (more than 2 hours) of time. One thing we’ve considered is forcing her to only play for 30 minutes at a time, thereby breaking up the length of a single session. Ultimately, however, I would just like to make sure that she comes to see video games not as the ultimate leisure or entertainment activity, but one particularly enjoyable thing among many other interests. But often it seems like her entire focus throughout the week is honed in on those three days when she can play video games.

Perhaps the answer is to allow brief play sessions throughout the week–but I balk at the idea of using video games as a carrot for homework and the like. In the long run, I’m much more interested in my daughter developing a healthy and balanced attitude toward video games. I wonder what other kinds of restrictions or frameworks gaming parents have given their children. Am I the only one who suffers from a kind of latent anxiety that my devoted interest in video games will somehow mess up my kids? In any case, perhaps the most important thing is to remain connected to my daughter’s game playing, to be observant of how games impact her, and to be flexible with my rules on gaming. Still, striking a balance between healthy moderation, outright prohibition, and unrestricted permissiveness is proving to be more difficult than I expected.