It’s been nearly six decades since the first mainstream video games came out and parents in 2026 are just as worried about the potential impact gaming is having on their children today as their counterparts were in the 70s, according to new research from the nonprofit Games for Change.
In her paper “Raising Good Gamers: What Families Need to Know About Video Games and Well-Being,” which was released in July by Games for Change, research director Rachel Kowert drew on analysis of nearly 200,000 media articles and social posts across 15 countries and seven languages to reveal on social media, negative sentiment about gaming outweighs positive sentiment by more than five to one (34% to 6%).
Kowert’s work found parents’ biggest concerns — screen time, addiction, and violent or age-inappropriate content — are based on common assumptions that are misaligned with the research.
“What I find most interesting is that the concerns that parents have today in 2026 are the same concerns that parents have had for the last 50 years: overexposure to inappropriate content, overuse and overdependence,” Kowert tells Variety. “So the fact that they have the same concerns tells me as a researcher that we’ve done a very poor job at getting the information out that we have in the research community to parents about what we know about what games are and what they aren’t.”
Kowert notes that while society has repeated the pattern of being afraid of the effects of new types of media and entertainment throughout the centuries (including books, films and TV), the fears about gaming have persisted for longer.
“I do see it being specific to gaming for a few reasons,” Kowert says. “One is because nothing has overtaken it. We have concerns about social media, but gaming is kind of different. It is also interactive. The other thing about gaming is with the media ecosystem we see a terrible violent crime happening and immediately it gets tagged with, ‘Oh that person played video games.’ And we’ve seen that, again, for the last 50 years. So there is something unique about this conversation. And sometimes I get pushback where they say, ‘Oh, well, social media has come.’ OK, we also do have fears about social media, which we now see, but it hasn’t replaced gaming because those fears still persist.”
Kowert’s research found that nearly 60% of children say they want to play more games with their parents and suggested a system called “SPACE” for parents who want to engage: “Show up with curiosity, Play together, Adjust for context, Cultivate digital citizenship, and Establish boundaries together.”
“It’s interestingly an argument for allowing gameplay at a younger age, so that you do start to build a foundation,” Games for Change chief program and operating officer Arana Shapiro says. “With the assumption that because so many kids are playing games, teens especially, that if you assume that your child is going to end up playing video games one way or another, then laying that foundation becomes extremely important so that you can fall back. Otherwise, they’re stepping into something that they’ve had no experience in. So like anything else as a parent, it’s a little bit of a responsibility to know how you’re going to lay that foundation to allow for a healthy growth as they get older.”
Games for Change initiative Raising Good Gamers launched a pilot parent workshop earlier this year for parents that asked families to build their own code of conduct for gaming, setting shared expectations that their children helped shape. By the end of the workshop, 82% of participants felt more confident talking with their children about gaming.
This September, the parenting workshop will be offered more widely through in-person events at community organizations across the U.S. and U.K., as well as through online webinars, with Kowert’s SPACE framework included.
“We are trying to encourage curious parenting,” Shapiro says. “So it’s very obvious there’s no way that we’re going to lead a successful workshop or have a successful interaction with parents if we’re just giving a laundry list of the games that are out there and what they should look for and what is good and what is bad because that’s ever changing. What we’re trying to do is create a method for helping parents understand how they can have the conversations with their children to understand what their kids are playing, what they like about it, why they want to play.”
