A reader gives some advice to young parents, on how to remain a gamer and share your hobby with your partner.

A topic that often seems to come up within the GC pages is finding the time to play games when you have a young family. It’s something I can relate to and I thought, as some others have done before me, I would write in to share my own experiences.

Like many first-time parents before me have undoubtedly found, after the birth of my daughter in January I soon came to realise that my free time had very quickly been extensively eroded. It was also rapidly apparent that one of the first things that needed to be sacrificed was my time spent either playing games, watching films, reading books, or going out somewhere. Whilst I’m thoroughly enjoying my new role as a parent, and caring for my baby daughter is definitely my favourite use of my time, it thankfully hasn’t meant having to curtail all of my hobbies, which includes playing games, completely.

I feel quite fortunate in that I have found it has helped massively that my partner is also a keen gamer. My wife enjoys playing games as much as I do and so something that we’ve found to work well is taking an occasional tag-team approach to the situation whereby one of us takes a well-deserved break and plays for an hour or so whilst the other one is on baby duty, and then we switch roles later in the day or evening.

In this way, both of us have been able to rack up dozens of hours each on Zelda: Breath Of The Wild over the last couple of months, while at the same time neither of us need to feel bad or guilty about ignoring their parental duties. Perfect! Then of course, once the little one is in bed for the night, ideally before 9pm if all goes well (and providing we can still keep our eyes open), we can have an hour or so of playing a game together, with Overcooked being a particular favourite of ours at the moment (though we have to try and keep the shouting at each other to a minimum!)...