Editor's Note: The following is a report on the practical applications of Olivia and Kurt Bruner's new book, PlayStation Nation: Protect Your Child from Video Game Addiction, (Hachette Book Group, 2006).

Video games are so popular among kids and teens that it seems like a normal activity for you to support as a parent.  If your children play video games, you may be screening the content carefully to try to reduce their exposure to objectionable material like sex and violence.  But even if your kids are playing the tamest games on the market, they can still suffer great harm from video games. That’s because video games are designed to be addictive – and they steal valuable time and energy away from your kids that could otherwise be used for healthy childhood activities.

Here’s how you can protect your children from video game addiction:

Recognize the danger. Video games act like digital drugs, triggering physiological reactions in people’s brains similar to those associated with substance abuse. Research has shown that playing video games shortens your kids’ attention spans, leads to lower grades in school, weakens their physical health, deadens their creativity, reduces the closeness of their relationships with family and friends, decreases their sense of responsibility and discipline, and causes them to focus on their own gratification rather than on learning how to serve others.  This all can occur at a crucial time in human development – during adolescence – when your kids’ brains are undergoing growth that hardwires them for life as adults.  Many people who become addicted to video games report experiencing significant health, financial, relationship, and academic problems.

Understand what feeds the addiction. Driving forces of video addiction include: beating the game (a desire to finish the game victoriously), competition (pitting players against each other), mastery (feeling powerful – almost like the god of an artificial realm), exploration (discovering new and secret things, like hidden levels inside the games), achieving or beating a high score (developing a sense of pride), story-driven role play (compelling kids to finish games to see how the stories end), and relationships (building anonymous and virtual relationships with other players).

Consider the lost potential. There’s so much your kids could be learning, doing, and accomplishing with their lives that they can’t while playing video games. Think about all the productive activities they could be engaged in if they weren’t devoting so much time and energy to video games.

Ask some key questions. Determine whether your children might have a video game problem by asking these questions about their involvement with video games: “Do your kids play almost every day?”, “Do your kids often play for long periods (more than three to four hours at a time)?”, “Do your kids play for excitement?”, “Do your kids get restless and irritable if they can’t play?”, “Do your kids sacrifice social and sporting activities to play?”, “Do your kids play instead of doing homework?”, “Do your kids try to cut down their playing but can’t?”, and “Do your kids seem to be losing interest in real-life activities?”.