You're listening to life kit from NPR.
Hey, everybody, it's Marielle.
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 brain rot 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 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.