Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:My two teen sons play games on their computesr, but we don't have any gaming systems, x-box, etc. Our teen daughter never plays.
Games on the computer are so much more sophisticated than games on the boxes. My son is only 13 and after going to a few programming camps in the summer has developed MODS for the PC that he has published (!) for minecraft. DH and I are in IT and when it comes to programming and publishing, he is wayyyy ahead of us. He even asked us to buy him a server, which of course was a no go, that is thousands of dollars even with him building it. His gaming is not all encompassing. He plays travel sports and is an excellent athlete and is in all honors classes and is 2 grades ahead in math and is tracked for Calculus by 10th grade.
Our approach has always been balance and we rarely say no about stuff like technology, but once again, DH and I have made great careers in technology. I had an old IBM-PC at home that ran on DOS and played Doom

It is important for them to learn to self regulate, or else when they do get their hands on it, it will be all consuming, as we have seen that with his friends who have very strict restrictions, they become zombies at our house and my kid ends up standing there asking if they want to play basketball in he court and he can't get his friend off the sofa.