Video Games and Kids
Do you allow your kids to play video games? After reading a post on Challies’ blog about a new book, “”What Every Parent Needs to Know About Video Games
Parents that are buying M rated games for their kids are negatively impacting their child. Now, speaking from someone who lets her 9 year old play Halo, that may seem like a contradiction. (more)
I’ve definitely created little geeks in my kids, but I am trying my best to protect their innocence while still being a mom that they can have fun with… How do you do it? Are you a video game teetotaller or do you allow game imbibing now and then?
The following is almost verbatim what I shared with a mom who felt that all video games were ‘unchrisitan’, isolating, anti-family, and destructive:
I respect your position and admire your conviction and determination to enforce in your home the values you and your husband have determined are right for your family.
I am going to take a moment to share my experience with video games. We resisted them. However when my son, who did an internship this summer as a youth minister, had his tonsils out at age 12 (an age when it is becoming as difficult to have this surgery as it is for an adult) we agreed to renting a Super Nintendo for him to use during his recovery. As the finances of it worked out it was cheaper to purchase a new system than cover all the deposits etc necessary up front – since we had promised he could use one during his recovery we took the cheap way. He had been diagnosed with a specific learning disability involving how his brain processed to put thoughts on paper and the mechanics of doing so in elementary school. The more he used the video game the more he overcame this difficulty – not to the point of eliminating it, but definite improvement. The more we thought about it we realized that the fine motor, eye-hand coordination, etc. that these games develop are necessary in many professions today, notably laparoscopy surgery. Instead of being an isoating activity as many have claimed, he has reached many teens by first establishing a relationship with them playing, discussing, etc. video games. He has friends around the world that he converses with that originated by discussing the games. I have had 2 – 4 systems hooked up in my home via wires while at least 2 and often 4 kids played on each system. They definitely interacted with each other while they were playing. They then spent the night and included devotional time in their activities. My son has even done school projects where he taped scenes that he posed with the games and then scripted to show whatever was needed. He often slipped religious input into these secular subjects. At 18 almost 19, he has given away most of his games. But I’m sure that this skill is one he will use with his middle-schoolers this summer.
My daughter does not care to have anything to do with the games.
It’s amazing the various ways God has made our minds to work and the flexibility. He makes “all things work together for good…” and Genesis 1: 28 “fill the earth and subdue it” God has given us so many ways of subduing the earth and all of the things we’ve created from the earth, and He makes it all work for His Glory!
God works in mysterious ways.
Right, all things are permissable but not all are beneficial as Paul said. We, as parents, have to decide what’s beneficial and what’s not