With the holiday shopping season already in high gear here in the U.S, and the annual blitz of advertising – especially for the big ticket items like video games and systems – in full assault mode, many parents find themselves trying to decide what kinds of games they are willing to let their kids play. Since many of these parents were, or maybe still are, gamers themselves they find themselves in the situation of maybe wanting to deny their kids the pleasures of things they themselves enjoyed at that younger age.
What to do? Check out Clive Thompson’s commentary You Grew Up Playing Shoot’em-Up Games. Why Can’t Your Kids? – from Wired.com for some thoughts on this:
Gamers like me have spent years railing against ill-informed parents and politicians who’ve blamed games for making kids violent, unimaginative, fat or worse. But now we’re in a weird position: We’re the first generation that is young enough to have grown up playing games, but old enough to have kids.
So it turns out that, whoops, now we’ve got to make sober calls about what sort of entertainment is good or bad for our children. And what, precisely, are we deciding? I started making calls to my gamer posse find out.
Parenting is one of the hardest, and most important, activities that any of us can ever try to master. And it is only getting more and more complicated as our children “grow up” faster and the tools and information they have available to them increase.
Having said that, Happy Thanksgiving to all my readers here in the US. And to my non-US readers, enjoy the time you have with your family, whether it is a formal get together like our Thanksgiving or just a weekend in the park.
no straight lines 