Reply to When to introduce video games?

Forum Index » General Parenting Discussion

Reply to "When to introduce video games? "

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I did not allow them until my youngest could read long books. We picked Harry Potter as our test case.  After younger kid could read Book 6, we got an iPad, followed by the Switch.  Around 2nd grade.

It is a Pandora's Box.  Pandora's Box is a story of the bad things about humanity, tempered by the good thing mixed in (Hope).

Don't rush it.  They pick it up quickly and go very deep.[/quote]

Why does every parent who tries to brag think Harry Potter is impressive. It’s English garbage.  [/quote]

PP.  I'm the parent who posted that.  Harry Potter is a long book series that is widely familiar to parents and children and easily available.  When I was that age (2nd grade-ish), the most "impressive" book I read was a -400 page biography of Anna Leonowens from the grownup side of the library.  I managed to get through it.  Although there were parts I didn't understand very well, not being a grownup.  Knowing my own kids, I wanted a target/benchmark book that was hundreds of pages long and reasonably above grade level.  Also, being part of a series guaranteed that a bunch of other books would get read along the way.

Actually my kid lost interest in Book 7 and DNF'ed it for a year or 2.  But I was satisfied that after Book 6, he had completed enough reading for me to consider him well-prepared for elementary school reading.

Neither of my children come close to how much I read as a kid and I watched plenty of junk TV.  I know the hours they've gamed for are pretty enormous, because many of the games have play time counters.  As entertaining as video games can be, and as socially bonding, they teach different skills from reading and the loss of reading time is arguably a disadvantage for school.  I remember discussing with my older son that one of his friends had spent a summer job worth of time on just one video game.  I think that it was about 160 hours of game time on something like auto racing.  It's not weird to put 20-50 hours into a game to beat all the levels.  That's why I stopped playing video games in my teens.  The time investment on a single topic/game was too large in my opinion.

I do believe that video games have some positive aspects but I think they can be physically unhealthy attention grabbers.  I also think it's a sad commentary on school that video games can be more interesting.  [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics