Addiction?

My twin sons mean the world to me and I try my very best to NEVER compare them to each other or choose a favorite which many parents tend to do. I have one who was sweet, became a hell-raiser, and is now very focused; honor roll, accolades, and becoming the man he was meant to be. My other twin, was a go-getter who still possesses a positive attitude, very much liked by his peers and teachers, but cannot seem to wean himself from video games. His grades are slipping but yet he claims to have everything under control. This, I do not doubt because above all, he is highly intelligent, and has a pure soul that radiates infectious, positive energy.  Like many parents, I worry too that my son’s gaming habit has become an addition. So, my point is how do I get him to focus more on his schoolwork and less on gaming?

One father, tired of his son’s failing grades, tried a unique way to curb a gaming addiction:

“A Chinese father, tired of his son playing video games instead of looking for a job, decided to hire some assassins. Their job: to kill his son’s characters in his favorite online role-playing games, local reports said.

According to Kotaku East, the man referred to as Mr. Feng had been concerned about his son, Xiao Feng, 23, since he started playing online games in high school. The post said the son’s grades suffered in school, and that his father now attributed the difficulty of landing a job to gaming, too.

“I think that this way, he will probably lose interest in the game, thus turning his attention to find work,” Xiao Feng’s father said in an original interview with Chinese newspaper, Sanqin Daily. He assured the death of his son’s gaming personalities by looking to players that were at a higher level than his son.

In rebellious fashion, despite being killed every time he logged on, Kotaku reported that Xiao Feng remained adamant about waiting for the right job to come along, “not just any job.”

In an interview with the BBC, Professor Mark Griffiths, a gambling and addictions expert at Nottingham Trent University, said about the father’s handling of the situation, “It’s not going to do much for family relations, but I don’t think these top-down approaches work. Most excessive game playing is usually a symptom of an underlying problem.”

The BBC also reported that father and son are said to have reconciled. Whether Xiao Feng found a job is uncertain.” Read the story here.

I am not for sure I would go this far, but a meeting with the school counselors, enlisting his brother, yep, his brother, to motivate him to take and pass AP (advanced placement) courses as he is doing, and finally limiting the internet connection. There is no internet for him after a certain hour. We will see how it goes.