the blog of a disabled mother who likes to game, and "get in the pit"
I got a lot of pictures of Bub’s first excursion to the park that’s down the road from our house, but this one happened to be my favorite of them all. We’ll probably walk down there more often since he likes it so much.
This is actually something that I have heard gamer (gaming?) parents say.
It’s usually also the ones who state that “anyone who uses walkthroughs is not a real gamer, or not a good enough gamer,” so the two kind of go hand in hand. I try to avoid these parents if I see them “out in the wild”.
They literally say, with their mouths, that if their kids struggle in a game that they will not help them. Or some of them say that they will, but that they “won’t help them with the final boss, because they have to do it on their own”. Do you know what kind of message that might send your struggling kid, especially if they’re young? Not only do the kind of parents that say these things tend to… carry it over into other aspects of parenting, but this is a really fantastic way to make your child want to give up on gaming (which is another thing that these parents, the Patrons of Gaming, would probably seethe over if it happened in front of them).
Tell me though, what is so bad about helping your child when they need it?
What is so bad about helping your child when they need any sort of help from you?
Because that sends the message that they can come to you for help for any reason and that you will be there to help them no matter what. And this will achieve exactly what you want to achieve but are going about trying to achieve in the worst possible way — your child will remain interested in video games and might pass that interest on to their children. (Or, you could do exactly what you’re doing now, cause your child not to be interested in video games at all, and stop that with this generation. This is your call here…)
As a child, I never thought that I would actually make this blog post as an adult…
But as a child, the only way that I had to get online was America Online, and most of my formative years were spent on dial-up with my parents having an idea who I was talking to, not quite approving of the “crowd of people” that I associated with for most of that time, but never really doing anything about it. I lived in the day where it was forbidden to give my full first name, or even my last name, to my friends, did so anyway to “rebel against my parents”, and had my so-called friends “use my name against me” whenever I did something that they did not like. Now, with the advent of Facebook, everyone knows your legal name (unless you’ve intentionally created an account where you’re not using it), so that’s almost absolutely moot.
But since you can do so much more on the Internet now, I feel like more parents need to be aware of what their children are doing online… and that more children don’t need to be given significant, unfettered access to the Internet. Even if it “makes their children mad”, mad is safe. As long as they’re young, they don’t need to have social media accounts in their own name, at least not unless their parent is friended with them on that account, has access to it themselves, and knows precisely what they are posting. Children do not need to have “safe spaces” on the Internet where they can share things away from their parents’ eyes, because this usually leads to bad things. They need to use age-appropriate sites that are either monitored by adults and used in an appropriate capacity, or they need to be monitored by their own parents to ensure that they remain safe online until they are old enough not to require monitoring. This is how we keep children safe.
Facebook has an age requirement for a reason. So do several popular chat programs.
But this doesn’t mean that parents should let their children “have at it” and not monitor them on their own.
Even if they’re busy working, they should either at least know what their child is doing or install parental control programs on their computers at home to ensure that their children can only access safe, age-appropriate websites or use the Internet at certain times or only for a certain number of hours per day.
“Worst-case scenario,” there is also the possibility of placing a password on the computer and putting it in themselves when they are around to provide monitoring, if that is absolutely something that has to be done.
Sure, a lot of the Internet is good. Most of it may be. But there are plenty of places on it that are not good.
I can’t begin to tell you (or, more literally, write about) how many times I’ve encountered a parent who “doesn’t really know what their kids play,” even though in most cases they’re the one who’s bought the game for them. Most of the oversight is because they’re too busy working, so they buy whatever game their kid asks for, so I can kind of see why this happens… even though I wish that wouldn’t. I wish that more parents could, or would, take the time out to do at least a little bit more research into the games that their children own, especially the ones that they are actively playing, particularly the ones that involve online play — I’ve actually surprised parents by telling them that online play is not rated as interactions can not be controlled, only punished after the fact if someone breaks a rule in an online game, is reported, and is actually punished for breaking that rule. They seemed to think that online play was encompassed by the game’s ESRB rating.
Good things to do to get a feel for games for your child:
· check out the ESRB rating, of course, as this gives you a general idea
· Google the game and read the summary, as this helps even better
(as you can get a feel for whether or not a game is appropriate for your child if you have not bought it yet)
· read the back of the game if your child already owns it for a synopsis
· Go to Amazon and read the reviews for the game (this is where you’ll find the most honest assessments)
· ask gamer friends if you have any for critiques on the game
· know which games require online interaction and Google how that tends to go
Hopefully some of these tips can help, as not many of them take a whole lot of time!