Video games have become an easy target in conversations about young people’s mental health, often without much understanding of the positive role they can play. Parents cite them as the cause of anxiety, isolation, and poor sleep. Researchers, meanwhile, keep finding that the picture is far from black and white. Games can be a lifeline for socially anxious kids, a coping tool for those with ADHD, a rare space where isolated teens feel competent and connected.
Both things get said every year. Only one gets the headlines.
As the charity director for Safe In Our World, the mental health charity for the people who make games and the people who play them, I can see that contradiction for what it is. I’ve noticed that the loudest narrative is usually the least useful one.
California is home to more game studios than almost anywhere else in the world. Millions of families in the state of California have a controller or a keyboard in the house, and millions of kids are spending part of their day inside a game world. Treating that entire experience as one undifferentiated mass of “screen time” doesn’t help a single one of them.
For a lot of young people, a gaming community is where they first feel capable and accepted
The truth is more complicated, and more hopeful, than the panic suggests. Some games and online spaces do genuinely contribute to isolation, anxiety or unhealthy habits, especially when kids play without guidance or without anyone paying attention to how they’re doing. That’s real, and it deserves real attention. But other games do something very different. They give kids a place to problem-solve with friends, to lead a team, to fail and try again without real-world stakes, and to feel like they belong. For a lot of young people, especially those who struggle to find that sense of belonging at school, a gaming community is where they first feel capable and accepted.
What separates a healthy gaming experience from a harmful one usually isn’t the game itself. It’s context: whether a child feels worse or better after they log off, whether the space encourages connection or preys on compulsion, and whether the adults around them are curious about that world instead of dismissing it outright. That’s the work Safe In Our World does every day, partnering with studios and clinicians to empower game studios and community leaders in supporting players’ mental health, and giving parents real tools instead of blanket bans.
Blanket restrictions on gaming make for an easy headline, but they don’t hold up to how kids actually live now. Telling a young person to simply “get off the game” without understanding what that game gives them, whether it’s friendship, creative expression or a sense of mastery, doesn’t address the underlying need. It just removes one of the few places they were meeting it.
You can assess the games they’re playing and use this opportunity to build a stronger, meaningful bond
A better approach starts with curiosity. Ask your kid what they’re building, who they’re playing with, and how they feel when they close the app. Try to play the game with them. Some games offer ways for you to play with your children, like Roblox’s new “Family Zone.”
Playing with your child helps you understand what draws them to a game. As their guardian, you can assess the games they’re playing and use this opportunity to build a stronger, meaningful bond. Is it sparking your child’s creativity and empowering their social connectedness? What’s the value?
World Mental Health Day is a chance to move past fear-driven headlines and toward something more useful: real understanding of what young people are getting out of the games they play, and real support to make sure it’s something good.
Games aren’t inherently the threat to kids’ mental health that they’re often made out to be. Ignoring what’s actually happening inside them is the real risk.
