Online gaming addiction: Children at risk as experts urge parental control

Schools and families across India face a growing crisis as addictive mobile games erode children’s health, concentration, and academic performance.

By D. Brinda | India Correspondent

The warning signs are visible in classrooms across India — children arriving at school exhausted, distracted, and increasingly disconnected from their studies. The cause, educators and parents say, is online gaming addiction, a problem that has grown into one of the most pressing child welfare concerns of the digital age.

Online gaming has become deeply embedded in the daily lives of school and college students throughout the country. Platforms offer an ever-expanding library of titles, from harmless puzzles to games that involve real money, dangerous challenges, or content designed to exploit young minds. Among the most alarming are games linked to self-harm challenges — including the widely reported Blue Whale game — alongside high-stimulation titles such as Free Fire, GTA, and Rummy, which reward continued play with points, levels, and in-game incentives that keep players returning compulsively.

The mechanics of addiction are straightforward. A game introduces itself as a source of mild pleasure. Each new level reached brings a small sense of achievement. The brain, seeking to repeat that reward, demands another session, and then another. Over time, what began as recreation becomes compulsion. By the time families recognise the severity, intervention is considerably harder.

The consequences extend well beyond distracted afternoons. Children caught in the cycle of online gaming across Indian schools frequently suffer deteriorating eyesight, disrupted sleep, poor nutrition, and a measurable decline in academic performance. Their concentration fragments. Household responsibilities, friendships, and physical activity are abandoned. In the most serious cases, children have been manipulated by certain games into performing dangerous real-world tasks and uploading evidence online — a risk that carries significant safeguarding implications.

The financial dimension compounds the harm. Many games are free to download but structured to extract money through paid levels, in-game purchases, or entry fees. Children, often unaware of the true cost, draw on family resources to continue playing. Internet access, a prerequisite for most online games, adds a further recurring expense.

Responsibility for early intervention lies with parents, teachers, and the wider community. Parental controls and network restrictions offer a first line of defence, as does monitoring screen time and replacing smartphones with basic handsets where appropriate. But technical measures alone are insufficient. Children respond to real evidence — testimonies from peers who have experienced the consequences of addiction, community theatre and storytelling that makes the dangers tangible, and open conversations about the difference between healthy recreation and harmful habit.

The most durable protection, however, is self-awareness. Helping children develop the capacity to distinguish benefit from harm — and to understand why certain games are engineered to keep them playing — gives them tools that no parental control setting can replicate. Guiding children away from peer groups already deep in addiction reduces exposure at a critical stage.

Online gaming is not inherently harmful. The question is whether India’s children are equipped to engage with it safely, and whether the adults around them are paying close enough attention to notice when they are not.

D. Brinda is a teacher at Government Higher Secondary School, Melpattampakkam, Cuddalore, Tamil Nadu, India, and India Correspondent for The Mt Kenya Times.

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