Online games for girls have been shown to have a positive impact on your child’s life, but they could improve yours too.
If you’ve entered into parenthood never really playing video games, you’re not alone. As many parents were well into their teens by the time online gaming platforms and home consoles really took hold. Which means that a huge number of parents don’t know what they’re doing when it comes to online gaming. Terms like MMORPG, FPS, PBG, and a million other acronyms float comfortably over your head, and morph themselves into a million different likely combinations.
While it’s not necessary to dump thousands of dollars into elaborate gaming setups, parents could benefit from sitting down with their kids on sites like Prinxy, a website that specializes in offering free online games for girls. Sure, at first glance the titles and colorful bursts of cutesy characters seem sweet enough to give anybody a toothache, but at second glance, the platform provides a wide array of games designed to engage your child. From promoting reading comprehension, to fine motor skills and problem-solving abilities, these seemingly simplistic games can help your child flourish creatively and developmentally. But what exactly can they offer you?
Deconstructing Desires
Perhaps the most important part of playing online games with your kids, is that it reinforces their interests. Helping to build confidence and descriptive vocabularies as they delve into all the reasons, they love Princess Halloween Party or Kitty’s Bakery. This sort of communication also helps children bond with their parents as their interests and good habits are reinforced. Specifically in girls, co-playing games with parents was associated with a decrease in both internalizing and aggressive behaviors, promoting more open communication between parent and child, according to one study.
Which is a golden moment in time for most parents with daughters. Particularly as children begin interacting with social media platforms at younger and younger ages, it becomes routinely more difficult for parents to find a place amongst the media as time goes on.
Women are more likely to be bullied or harassed both in online gaming formats and with social media accounts, meaning that parents need to start unpacking healthy reactions and responses to these issues as early as possible- which can more easily happen if parents immerse themselves in online games for girls, with their girls. Giving them a real-time idea of how their child might react to upsetting situations in a digital environment.
Media and Adolescence
Online games are often the gateway to technological curiosity and competency. This participation in the world of digital culture is what helps to breed proficiency later in life, and technological proficiency is absolutely a life skill in this day and age. Pre-adolescence is an opportune time to introduce online games for girls- partly because these games can help build fundamental cognitive and functional skill sets, but also because your child will begin to form their own identity at this point.
Co-playing games with your children allows them to both conform and rebel against parental desires in a productive environment. Games that offer either competitive or cooperative gameplay can help curate both of these very normal adolescent attitudes in a healthy way. Which can also translate to how your child views your ally-ship in later years.
Importance of Online Games for Girls Co-Play
Outside of just getting to enjoy directly indulging in one of your child’s interests, online games for girls specifically have a huge impact on self-image, self-esteem, and gender identity. In a paper titled Remember Not to Die: Young Girls and Video Games, authors discuss how the inborn traits of a game can heavily influence the pressures put on girls specifically. As most games require that “[girls] have to pursue the demands of contemporary femininity which blend together traditional masculinity and femininity. Which another study goes on further to embody by describing how girls and boys responses differ to “gender neutral” games, with girls most likely to compromise their tastes and feelings in order to appear “knowledgeable and cool [in a masculine context]”
Which could bring further support for the idea that co-play between parents and children is important at younger ages, specifically in father-daughter paradigms. As it could help normalize confidence in feminine behaviors to a trusted masculine audience. Especially as most research I found on the subject at large merely serves to underscore the effect games have on the social behaviors of children.
So, starting to support these roles early, understanding your child’s identity and desires as they form, is a huge part in finding future representation within the technological sphere. Which for most people, extends far past the realm of just games for girls, being the backbone of our entire society as we know it. This simple and, admittedly, fun immersion in your child’s world could not only give them better coping strategies and stronger confidences in their own identities- but it just might polish up your own gaming prowess and fashion skills. Which we as parents could definitely use.