#12592561, By breakablepants Gaming with a 5 year old, too soon?

breakablepants 21 Feb 2020 15:22:11 1,118 posts
Seen 1 week ago
Registered 7 years ago

Hard to know how balanced any advice on a gaming forum is really going to be :-)

My son is 7 and I've really enjoyed playing on my Switch with him in the past 6 months. Pretty much all kids will be playing some form of mobile games as soon as they are toddlers, so as everyone else has said, it is down to the parents to monitor and control.

What I wouldn't do is necessarily 'push' kids into gaming over other stuff. Especially once they start school you really need to enforce screen time and all that stuff as of course they will want to play games rather than do homework! The simple rule we have is no games during the week where possible - maybe a bit of ipad or iphone games if we want some peace when out for dinner etc. Then on the weekend it's 2-3 hours tops. That way, it's still a treat and not a habit, and so you can easily use game time as a bribe to get them to do stuff!

The Switch is great as so many of the games are kid-friendly. I would not let my son play on my PS4 as the games tend to be more adult-themed and violent; on the Switch we have MarioKart, Mario Oddessy, Zelda, Pokemon GO, Mario Maker 2. Half of those he can play by himself, half it's co-op with me, which is brilliant fun. A few of his friends also have Switches so MarioKart is the go-to.

Over Christmas I got him a couple of Labo kits which are absolutely brilliant. 7 years old is probably the minimum they can make stuff for themselves (despite the kits saying 6+). They are quite complex and take a long time, so it's an attention-span issue. But the kits and the games are superb.

Personally, I try hard to steer him away from violent games and violent ads for games - which is really hard on mobile especially as loads of the free to play games have cartoony violence, and the advertising even more so. In fact, I turn my phone into airplane mode before launching games so that the ad server can't connect and inject the ads ;-)

I think above everything, just make it into a fun, positive experience rather than a babysitting tool. Playing Zelda with my son was absolutely brilliant, same with Mario Oddessy with me s Mario and him as Cappy. Nintendo is just so brilliant at these kinds of games.