Our kids’ online lives can seem a bit of a mystery. Especially if they enjoy gaming, they can sit – headphones on and behind closed doors – for hours on end, making you wonder who they’re communicating with and what those conversations are like. If so, one popular gamer has advice for parents: You should listen.
David Marchese recently spoke to Tyler Blevins – better known as ‘Ninja’, a popular video game streamer among teens and young adults – for the New York Times. Blevins says he regularly runs into kids who say racist things or who are aggressive and threatening to women while he’s streaming.
It would be great, says Blevins, if you could somehow track down the parents of those kids to let them know what offensive or inappropriate language their tweens or teens are using online, but that’s not possible, which means that parents should be vigilant about what their own says the child. As Blevins says:
It all comes down to parenting. Do you want to know who your child is? Listen to him when he’s playing video games when he thinks you aren’t. Here’s another thing: How does a white boy know he has a white privilege if his parents never teach him or don’t talk about racism? When they’re gaming and their first interaction with racism is one of their friends says the N word and they have no idea what it is – what if it was on my stream? Is it my job to have this conversation with this guy? No, because the first thing that comes to mind is this guy is doing this on purpose to troll me.
G / O Media can receive a commission
This is the inherent problem with the arguments “let children be children” and “talking about racism and sexism only divides us further”. If we, as parents, don’t talk to our children about these issues, society (especially their peers) will be waiting to do it for us. They can learn – and use – words they’ve never heard before in an offensive way without even realizing to what extent they are offensive, and they may not think about asking what a word or phrase means before putting it in. adopt their own language. , hurting or insulting others. Not to mention that they might say things that could lead to them is reported.
I’m not usually one to advocate poking around in the privacy of a child (unless there is some compelling safety reason to do so), but Blevins’s suggestion to keep an ear on your child’s gaming talk is a good one. I don’t recommend that you pull up a chair and put an ear to their bedroom door for an hour, but if you listen every now and then you might get some insight into how they communicate with gaming buddies online and if there are any some conversations you need to have.
At the very least, it’s a good idea to check in with them every now and then to ask about the gaming buddies they met online and what it was like playing with those friends. As long as you’re engaged and interested, they are more likely to open up to you about these interactions, which can pave the way for productive conversations.