Save the Children: the esports industry does not protect the health of young players

Report on children's rights in esports

On October 27, the organization Save the Children published the report “Protecting Child Rights in Esports,” which states that children's health and well-being in competitive video games are insufficiently protected. The authors call on the fast-growing industry to put children's rights, enshrined in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, above sporting ambitions. According to the report's estimate, up to 300 million children worldwide are young esports players. “Children remain children first, and only then athletes,” said Theo Thorresson, a psychologist at Save the Children and a gaming expert, adding that participation in esports must not come at the expense of a child's rights, health, and development.

Physical health and the lack of standards

Among the main risks for young players, the report cites prolonged sitting, a lack of breaks, and training schedules that take time away from sleep, physical activity, and schoolwork. Long gaming sessions and poor posture lead to pain in the neck, shoulders, and wrists, while late-night gaming schedules disrupt rest patterns, affecting cognitive function and emotional resilience. The key problem is the absence of generally accepted norms: a representative of a national esports federation, quoted anonymously in the document, admitted that there are no unified recommendations on game duration or training methods, and that current practices — screen breaks, healthy eating, sleep, and hydration — were compiled by the federation on its own from various studies. “There is not yet a single center that would bring all of this together into standards,” the report's source noted. At the same time, the picture is not exclusively negative: the authors note that many professional players report a satisfactory level of physical activity, and higher-level players are more likely to pay attention to physical fitness and healthy habits.

Psychological pressure and online toxicity

A separate section of the report is devoted to mental health. According to the authors, the demanding competitive environment combined with online toxicity creates serious risks: stress, anxiety, and depression are intensified by fierce competition and limited access to professional support. Young players interact with audiences through in-game chats, Discord, the streaming platforms Twitch and YouTube, and social media — this helps build communities but makes them vulnerable to cyberbullying and privacy violations. The report presents an analysis of chats during 302 game streams by the twenty most popular Twitch streamers: 62% of streams contained sexist remarks, 37% racist remarks, 84% ableist language, and 97% contained language with threats or calls to violence. Some federations and teams require staff to complete psychological first aid courses, but according to the authors, this practice has not become an industry standard. The report also warns that young players are often put in the public eye before they have gained the experience and support needed to handle public attention, interviews, and live broadcasts.

Exploitation and unequal access

Beyond health, the authors point to structural problems in the industry: persistent serious disparities in access to participation based on income, gender, race, LGBTQIA+ identity, and disability; insufficient involvement of children in decision-making; economic exploitation, in which teams, agents, and even parents take advantage of young players through opaque contracts and unequal distribution of influence; as well as risks at in-person events with insufficient adult supervision. The overall problem, as the report puts it, is that children enter structured competitive environments with expectations comparable to professional sports, but without comparable safeguards that take their age and level of development into account. The absence of common standards, as the document notes, raises the question of who is actually responsible for ensuring that esports is compatible with children's physical and psychological development.