My Son Is Addicted to Video Games.
What Actually Helps?

Mentoring young adults online since 2001. Updated October 2026.

Taking the games away works… for a while… until it doesn’t. What works long-term is building into his real life the things the game is already giving him: one clear next step, progress he can see, a way around things that do not work, side quests when moving forward gets frustrating, someone who notices every week, and a win he earned. That is what we do, in tasks for the real world, one hour at a time, on Zoom, and most families stay with us for nine to fifteen months.

Book a free 15-minute call with Ken.

What parents tell me

When a parent talks to me about video games, the concern is almost always the same. He is on that screen sixteen hours a day. He does not eat with us. He goes to sleep when the sun is coming up. His laundry is all over the floor and he is behind in life.

By the time we speak, most parents have already tried taking the screens away. Router off at midnight. Console in the trunk of the car. Phone handed in before bed. It works for about four days.

If that is your house, you are not doing it wrong. You are fighting a world that was built by people who are very well paid to keep the eyeballs and clicks coming and that progress bar filling up.

Why does taking the games away not work?

Inside the game he knows exactly what to do next. He can see his progress on a bar. He is ranked. People expect him to show up and support the team, and he does, at the cost of school, real-life friends and laundry. In that world he is capable and things work.

Now look at his real life. No clear steps. No bar. Nobody ranked. And if he fails, he fails in front of people whose opinion he still has to live with tomorrow. There are no extra lives.

The screen is the one world where he still feels capable, and where he can try, fail and not be judged. When you take it away, you close that world, and nothing he has worked at and succeeded in is there to take its place. That is why it does not hold.

Is my son addicted, or is this something else?

In my experience it is rarely only the games. The gaming is where he went when the rest of his life stopped working: a course he fell behind in, a job he quit, friends who moved on, a diagnosis of ADHD or autism that nobody built a plan around. The games did not cause that. They filled in for what was missing.

That matters because it changes our goal. Our goal is not to get him off the games. It is to see him for his strengths and challenges and give him something better in the day he can go after and win.

What do we do instead?

We amplify the things we focus on. So instead of starting with what is not working (it will come up, believe me), we start with a sleep-wake routine, because a young adult who wakes at four in the afternoon has no day left to change. To change how your son wakes up, we have to take on the sleep ritual. “But I have no sleep ritual!” he protests. Trust me. Playing COD until 3am with Chucky in Guam, then being too wired to sleep so you watch four hours of Rick and Morty, is a sleep ritual. We start with a sticky note on his monitor that says “turn off around 1am, when I’m in the lobby.” We aim for out of bed at 11:59am, because then he has left the game on his own and has officially woken up in the morning. This is your son thinking ahead the night before to get ready for the real world the next day. It is a solid start.

And when things fall apart, we reboot. “OK, how do we start again?” Until starting again feels the way it does on the screen: just another chance to find a way forward.

In our first session he chooses three goals. He directs. His mentor guides. Progress is tracked and read back to him, because at the start he will not believe it unless he can see it.

Screen time comes down on its own because there is something else in the day he can win. The sleep and the daily routines are the new game.

Wyatt and Dana’s story

Wyatt was 21 when his mother, Dana, found us from Amarillo, Texas. He had 63 credit hours toward mechanical engineering and had moved out in August to live with a friend. Almost immediately he stopped going to class, stopped studying and started to isolate. He gained twenty-five pounds in four months. By March he was out of money for rent, food and gas, his therapist had moved away, and his parents were looking at a residential program in Utah. On the intake form Dana ticked anxiety, school failures, video game addiction, low self-esteem and lack of follow-through. In her words: “He is very bright, funny, very athletic, and a genuinely kind soul.”

In our first session Wyatt told me he loves to figure things out, which is his superpower and his kryptonite. Home schooled through high school, dyslexic, better with numbers than words, he had hit a professor whose rule was “if you’re not passing, you are failing,” felt the anxiety snowball, and started skipping. Then came the first semester on his own: “Freedom!” Then the games and Netflix, which he called an escape from life. We put them on the list to track, tenth of twelve, and went to work on the other eleven.

Two weeks in he was going out to the family farm every day, going to bed on time, and had handled a parking-lot accident and the insurance claim by himself. His line: “I think I’ve gotten past the point of, my parents aren’t here, I can skip things.”

The thing he was running from turned out to be a basketball game. At fifteen he scored thirty points and hit the winning shot in a semi-final, and seniors told him they could not win without him. He heard: if I am not perfect, I will let everyone down. Seven years later that sentence was still running his life. Once he said it out loud, we could finally work on it.

We spent the spring finding out what he actually wanted. He researched every kind of engineering, took a coding class that turned out to be the wrong one and finished the project anyway, and kept coming back to one idea: new ways to run a cotton farm with drones and AI. In July he sat down with his parents. His words: “We’re going with the farming route.” By September he had talked to his grandfather, who was “real open to it,” cleaned out the barn (“I probably lifted five thousand pounds”), tracked down a cousin who had applied for every young-farmer grant going, and was reading up on drip irrigation and crop insurance. By November he was running the cotton stripper from ten in the morning until late at night and asking how to get the farm registered in his name.

The video games never came up again. Nobody took them away. There was just a day that needed him more.

How long does it take?

Most parents see the first changes in sleep within the first month or two, then a change in attitude, then one thing done without being asked. We find the life goals that speak to him, and the daily routines carry him toward them. Most families stay with us for nine to fifteen months. The gaming no longer needs to stop. It just stops being the whole of him.

Who does the mentoring, and what does it cost?

Master Level Mentoring with Ken Rabow is $995 a month, once a week, or $1,995 a month for twice a week. 2nd Degree Mentoring with Jason Munroe or Philip Rowland starts at $449.95 a month for once a week. Every session is one hour, one on one, on Zoom. See all options on the Pricing page.

How do I get him to agree to this?

You do not sell him on fixing his gaming. You tell him the truth: this is someone who will not take the games away, who will not judge him, and who will help him build a life where he is as capable off the screen as he is on it. Most young men say yes to a free first conversation on those terms. Some say no, and we talk about that on the call.

What if he has already said no to therapy?

Most of the young adults we work with have. Mentoring is not therapy. There is no diagnosis, no couch and no homework he did not choose. He sets the goals. We keep score with him. That is a different conversation from the ones he has been refusing.

What does this look like in your home?

What have you tried, and why did it stop working? Book a free 15-minute call and tell me what you are dealing with, in regard to the games and everything else they are affecting, and I will tell you how mentoring can help your child and your family.

And if you are not ready to talk yet, bookmark this page. Read more of my articles. Talk to friends who have tried mentoring. The next step should be taken when you are ready.

Keep reading: Why Smart Young Adults End Up Alone. My Autistic Son Will Not Leave His Room. Failure to Launch: What It Really Means.