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Working parents, how do you find time to game?

I grew up an avid gamer. But now, among my 50-hour work week, helping my kids with their math homework, grocery shopping, and house chores, I’m no longer able to find enough free time to really dive into a game. I mostly play casual games that I can drop in and out of but forget about the 40hr+ games requiring commitment. Despite not having the free time to game like I used to, I do enjoy watching my kids play while I’m doing other things around the house and then listen to them telling me about their accomplishments afterwards. I would like to hear from community members with similar circumstance about how you manage your time.

rivingtondown ,

My kid is a toddler, I can’t play games around him, even on my Switch or Steam Deck because he’s too distracting and wants too much attention. My wife and I usually play games for about an hour after he goes to sleep and we finish all the chores (laundry, cooking, dishes, food prep, daycare prep).

Between about 9:00pm and 10:00pm, on weekends if either of us have the time we’ll try to get chores done during the day while he’s awake which would give us maybe one more hour.

That’s it though, probably a third of the time we spend that single hour with some other form of relaxation (TV, book, social media, maybe ½ a movie). Another third of the time we just have other obligations or extra chores - maybe we need to do taxes or buy airplane tickets or book hotels for travel. Then, probably one or two nights a week on average we’re just too tired to do anything past 9pm and go to bed early.

So… all said, maybe 3 hours of gaming a week on average. Every so often my wife or I will take the kiddo out by ourselves and the other will have an extra hour or two for whatever but that’s not every week.

catch22 ,
@catch22@programming.dev avatar

I think I found for me that it was more the adult game content than anything else that kept me from playing a lot. My kids are 9 now, but when they were 3 or 4 Imy solution was to buy a psvita off ebay and use the remote play a lot. I think they have the same thing for phones and you can buy some pretty cool controller attachments. Although it’s not perfect, it allowed me to play some more intense PS games from anywhere in the house, without having to worry about the little ones seeing them.

bermuda ,

My dad’s a working gamer parent and he definitely struggles with it. He has a lot of time on weekends, but on weekdays he’ll usually only game for about an hour or however long 2 or 3 levels in the game he’s playing is. There’s times where he’s spent well over a month completing a game that me (a college student with way too much free time) completed in a week.

epchris ,

Basically I get 30 minutes to an hour after they’re in bed and that’s about it :-(

nlm ,
@nlm@beehaw.org avatar

I know that feeling… I play a little bit at night when only us adults are up. It helps that my wife also games at times.

Other than that… I work from home so I might sneak in some gaming during lunch breaks and so on.

Overall? Not a whole lot.

If I get up to 2 hours a day I’m pretty happy. :P

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