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You're listening to Life Kit from NPR.

Hey everybody, it's Mariel.

If I told you that your child or your younger sibling or your niece spent hours yesterday playing video games, would that bother you?

It used to bother Yuki Noguchi.

I thought it was brainrod and frivolous and that, you know, they were wasting time that they could be using to do something really productive and developmentally valuable.

I mean, that was the pressure I put on myself as a parent.

Yuki is a correspondent on the science desk at NPR and a mom to two boys.

And lately she's been reporting on kids and gaming.

To be clear, when we say gaming and games, we're not talking about dodgeball.

Games have been around since the start of civilization, right? Like tic-tac-toe or board games,

things have been around for a long time like that, right? But we're talking about gaming right now because it's digitized.

Yuki says the fact that the play happens over technology can make gaming sound like it's another

species of thing entirely.

And it can make parents and caregivers wary of it.

But she says there are a lot of benefits kids can get from gaming, depending on what

the game is. There are so many kinds of games. Sports games, word games, games where you go on a

quest or you race a car. There's even online chess. Experts told me it's really good to know what

kind of game your kid is playing. Like, right? What are they learning? What are they

getting out of it? And then that might give you a sense of what kind of skills they might be practicing.

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