What if the video game your kid spends hours playing isn’t pulling them away from you—but could actually be one of the best ways to get closer?
On this episode of the Men’s Therapy Podcast, host Marc Azoulay talks with psychotherapist Brian Keating, who specializes in Minecraft therapy and works with children, young adults, and families. Brian explains why dismissing video games as “brain rot” can cause parents to miss what’s actually happening inside their child’s world.
For Brian, play is communication. The way a child plays can reveal how they’re experiencing the world, from bullying and negative self-talk to frustration, disappointment, confidence, and resilience. Minecraft gives children a space where they can create, explore, take risks, fail, restart, and sometimes even teach their parents something.
The conversation also tackles one of the biggest challenges for modern dads: how to enter a child’s digital world without simply becoming another person telling them to get off the screen. Brian and Marc explore letting kids win, modelling healthy responses to failure, understanding screen dependency, creating online safety boundaries, and using side-by-side activities to make vulnerable conversations easier.
Most importantly, the episode argues that parents don’t necessarily need to pull kids out of their digital world. They need to learn how to enter it.
This episode is for fathers and parents trying to understand their children’s relationship with video games, screens, and online communities. It’s especially useful for dads who struggle to connect with kids through their interests or who aren’t sure how to respond when their child melts down over losing, failing, or being asked to stop playing. It’s also valuable for therapists, counsellors, teachers, and anyone interested in play therapy, Minecraft therapy, child development, emotional regulation, and modern parenting.
Brian describes Minecraft as an open-world sandbox where children can explore, create, modify their environment, and express their identity without following a predetermined script. That freedom is part of what makes the game useful therapeutically.
In a Minecraft therapy session, Brian isn’t simply joining a child to have fun. He’s paying attention to what the child communicates through play. A child dealing with bullying may recreate those dynamics in the game. A child struggling with negative self-talk may reveal it through the way they talk to themselves while playing. A child struggling with resilience may have a major emotional reaction after being defeated. The game becomes a shared environment where emotional patterns can be noticed and worked through.
Brian’s central idea is simple: play is the communication of children. Adults can talk about a terrible day with friends, process emotions through conversation, or listen to a podcast. Children often play out what they’re experiencing instead. Parents can therefore learn a lot by stepping back and asking what their child is communicating emotionally through their play rather than focusing only on the details of the story. The goal isn’t to overinterpret every action. It’s to notice the emotional experience underneath it.
Yes—and that’s one of the biggest themes of the episode.
Minecraft can create opportunities for children to practice creativity, problem-solving, disappointment, resilience, frustration tolerance, and emotional regulation. Fathers can also model what healthy frustration looks like instead of rage quitting or throwing a controller.
The important part is making the connection between what happens in the game and what happens outside it. A child who learns how to recover after losing in Minecraft can begin practising the same recovery skills when they lose at sports, struggle at school, or experience disappointment elsewhere.
One of Brian’s more controversial suggestions is that parents should sometimes let their children win.
His reasoning isn’t about handing children participation trophies or protecting them from competition. Instead, it’s about giving children opportunities to experience competence, confidence, and control.
Brian describes asking children whether they want him to play at an easy, medium, hard, or extremely difficult level. When a child realizes they’re struggling, they can choose to lower the difficulty and experience success. That choice also encourages them to notice how they’re feeling and decide what challenge they’re ready for. For fathers, the exercise can also expose their own beliefs about competition and the experiences they had playing with their parents.
Minecraft offers something that real life often doesn’t: the ability to respawn. When a character gets defeated, the player can restart. Brian uses this as a metaphor for helping children understand that failure doesn’t have to mean the end of the experience. If a child has a meltdown at an amusement park, for example, a parent can help them “respawn” by changing environments, getting a snack or drink, taking a break, and starting again.
The larger lesson is that how children respond to failure inside the game can become practice for how they respond to failure outside it.
Brian can be reached through his website, https://www.brianwkeating.com/.
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