It happens. Every. Single. Time.
For me at least 🙄 …
Here’s the situation. My kid (almost 6 years old) is playing the Nintendo Switch, or is playing something on an iPad. I walk up to them and hover for a moment, primarily to see what they’re playing. Admittedly, that’s a mistake in itself. I’m working on it 😬 . I then make the significantly greater mistake of saying, “Okay, five more minutes and then we have to take a break.”
Absolute hell breaks lose. Sometimes it’s a wild whimper. Other times it’s sounds like someone is being murdered. Either way…it’s shit. They proceed to do anything and everything in their power to keep playing. There comes a point when it’s not to keep playing at all. I’m not the perfect parent. My responses vary. But I’m working on getting better. Because in that moment, it’s a two-way street.
Here’s what’s actually happening
“Just one more minute” is a lie. Not because your kid is actually lying to you. It’s in part because the game already lied to them first. Two true things are stacking on top of each other in this scenario.
First: the game is built to make “one more” feel true.
A checkpoint might be fifteen seconds away in Mario Kart. A loot drop might land in their next round in Fortnite. A foe might only have one stock life left before you (the player) might win!
These aren’t accidental. It’s what’s called a variable-ratio reward schedule, the same mechanism behind slot machines. Researcher Natasha Schüll literally spent fifteen years in one of my favorite places studying this exact mechanism: Las Vegas, baby! She wrote about it in Addiction by Design. She calls this trance state that your kid is falling into the “machine zone,” where players stop playing to win and start playing just to keep playing. Unpredictable rewards (and unpredictable outcomes to a lesser degree) are much, much more impactful on your kid than predictable ones. Hell…they’re just as gripping for adult players. Believe me, I know! Game designers know this. Believe me, I know this too! It’s why “one more” always feels one round, one turn, one pack, one strike away from true.
Second: your kid would struggle to stop even without the game.
Switching from one absorbing element of a game to another draws on what developmental psychologists call cognitive flexibility. It’s the skill of disengaging from one task and re-engaging with another. This skill is literally undeveloped in kids. It’s non-existent! It’s not online in their heads! There’s actually a classic lab test for this. It goes a little something like this:
Sort these cards by shape. Now switch and sort them by color.
Most three-year-olds get stuck on the rule and can’t make the switch. It’s only around five-years-old that kids begin being able to do this exercise successfully. That’s the same muscle your kid needs to put the controller down when you ask. Some days, it’s just…still loading 😆 .
Here’s what might actually work
Consider the following. None of it will kill a meltdown, but it does stop stacking a design problem on top of a developmental one.
Set a timer at the start, not as a warning. “You have 20 minutes” beats “5 more minutes” shouted from the kitchen. It’s not a negotiation it it was never open-ended.
Go concrete, not abstract. “One more level” is something a kid can imagine ending, whereas “five more minutes” is an abstraction they have no internal clock for. Your five more minutes is not going to line up to be their five more minutes. That’s just the way it is.
Know the game’s save points. If you’re OP like me 😛 you might know when a game automatically saves. If you’re not, that’s okay. Just watch them play for a minute and look for a saving signal or cue on the screen. Ask them about the game while you do this. Some games let you stop clean really often. Others only checkpoint many minutes in between. If you’re lucky enough to have your kid using a switch, simply promise them everything will be saved when you turn it off (it will pick right back up where you left it when you turn it on).
Warn your kid in stages. Five minutes. Two minutes. One minute. This beats a single warning dropping on their head out of nowhere (in their mind).
Plan what comes after. I find this one to be significant. A hard stop into nothing is worse than a hard stop into something. You’re kid’s world is totally ending if they stop playing. Ease them out with reassurance of some type of activity or engagement to follow once they stop, and then follow through. Hell…if you’re like me, you can try and twist the next thing into a “game” of sorts. A bit of added relief 😅 .
With that, I have to go get my kid off the Nintendo Switch now 🙂
What’s the phrase you’ve found ends your negotiation? What works best? Or, what seems to never work for you?
Hit reply, and tell me what you’ve actually tried.
Thanks for pressing pause with me!
– Patrick