When obsession is a good thing

Having raced through the Harry Potter books at lightning speed, in the last few months my older daughter has been reading and rereading–and rereading and rereading and rereading and rereading–the Warriors books by Erin Hunter. She reads all the time it seems. When she gets home from school. After dinner. Before bed. On weekend mornings. When relatives come over and she is bored. Really any free time she has.

She gets so absorbed that she doesn’t hear what is going on around her. We have to ask her things twice and three times. We have to insist that she stop reading to come to eat, or get ready to leave the house for an errand. She makes drawings of the characters from the books, and invents new characters and story lines. She makes models of where the clans live.

Now we’re happy that she likes reading, of course. It is great that she is passionate about it and gets so caught up in it. Reading is a good thing. But she doesn’t spend as much time as she used to doing arts and crafts projects. Sometimes she chooses to read rather than play with a friend. She spends less time playing make believe with her sister, or building with blocks and lego. So there is a tradeoff.

And I can’t help but think that if she were playing a video game (or games) in the same way, she would get a different reaction from the adults around her. The word “addiction” would be thrown around. There would be a discussion, perhaps, about time limits or rules about when she could play and under what conditions.

I can’t honestly say what my position would be if she were “on the computer” the way she is “in her books” right now, since it is hard to do that thought experiment. How I felt would certainly depend on the details: what game she was playing, and how she was playing it. I hope, though, that I would support anything constructive that my daughter did with such a passion–anything that she was devoted to, and turned into a creative outlet in a positive way as she has with these books.

As part of that, I read one of the books, and it was fun being able to talk with my daughter about it–as a piece of literature, but also just to be able to ask informed questions about this world that she is so engaged in. In How Computer Games Help Children Learn I write about the importance of playing games with your children. Same applies to reading, not surprisingly.

When I get asked in interviews about whether kids can get addicted to computer games I say: Of course they can. They can play games to the exclusion of other things that are important parts of their life. They can neglect friends, or school, or other pursuits. But I also say that I would worry as much about a child who read so much that they didn’t have time for other interests–or a child who played sports and never read–as I would about a child who played computer games to the exclusion of everything else.

But it turns out drawing that line is pretty tricky in practice. It depends on how much you value the thing your child is passionate about, and it depends on how they are passionate about it. And you can’t make that assessment unless you understand the things your children are getting obsessed about.

All of which is just to say that learning more about the things your kid cares about is an important part of parenting. In the digital age, where the technologies of life change so quickly, parents–and schools–need to work hard to keep up with what our kids are doing.

In fact, we should be obsessed with it.