If you’re a parent worrying about how much screen time is too much. Wondering if those hours in the digital world are developing new-skills or killing brain cells? Or concerned that the culture online is driving a wedge between you and your kids, then this letter is for you.
One day, I sat across from my kids – controllers in hand, headsets on – and realized I was losing them. Not to bad influences or dangerous choices, but to something more subtle: a digital world I didn’t understand and couldn’t enter.
I felt like an outsider in my own home.
The Gap Between Us
My kids weren’t doing anything wrong. They were playing games, connecting with friends online, building skills I couldn’t see or appreciate. They were thriving in virtual spaces while I stood on the outside, watching through a window I felt I couldn’t open.
The harder I tried to pull them back into “the real world,” the wider the gap became.
Sound familiar?
Meeting Them Where They Are
So I made a choice: instead of fighting the digital world, I would try to understand it.
I learned about competitive gaming, esports, the psychology of virtual identities. I watched streams, read forums, asked questions. I stopped seeing gaming as “screen time” and started seeing it as a culture – one my kids inhabited as naturally as I inhabited the physical world.
And then I wrote them a book.
Connection:Lost – A Bridge Between Worlds
Connection:Lost is a YA sci-fi thriller about Jay, a fourteen-year-old gamer recruited to beta-test a revolutionary VR combat simulator. It’s his dream come true – until the lines between the game and reality begin to blur, and he’s forced to ask: who am I when the screen turns off?
I didn’t write this book to demonize gaming or glorify it. I wrote it to honor the complexity of what our kids experience – the genuine connections they build online, the identities they explore, the skills they develop – while also asking deeper questions about what it means to be real.
What I Learned
Writing this book taught me something unexpected: the problem wasn’t gaming. The problem was my refusal to meet my kids where they were.
When I started asking about their games, their strategies, their online friends – when I stopped judging and started listening – the connection came back. Not because they stopped gaming, but because I stopped treating their world as less real than mine.
For Gaming Families
If you’re struggling to connect with a child who seems more alive in Minecraft than at the dinner table, I see you. If you’re tired of battles over screen time, tired of feeling like the enemy, tired of the distance, then his book is for you and your family.
Connection:Lost isn’t a parenting manual. It’s a story. But stories have a way of opening doors that lectures can’t.
Maybe it will give you something to talk about with your gamer. Maybe it will help them feel seen. Maybe it will remind you both that connection is possible; if we’re willing to meet each somewhere in the middle.
Get the Book
Connection:Lost is available now on Amazon in ebook and Kindle Unlimited.
Want the behind-the-scenes story you won’t find on the blog? Join my reader community for exclusive bonus content, updates on Book 2, and the personal essay about what writing Connection: Lost taught me about connection.
Written with honesty (and a little help from my kids),
Paul (P.R. Morrison)
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