And video games. MANY people play video games for hours, every day. Imagine what else they could be learning, or doing, in that time. When they graduate from college, they will have played hundreds, perhaps thousands, of hours of video games, and have nothing to show for it. They could have learned to play a musical instrument, or learned a language, or learned to code, or how to repair cars, or had a job, or started an online business, or a relationship with another person, or gotten in shape, or developed interpersonal communication skills, etc.
But they spent their time alone, staring at a screen, playing a game that rewards their dopamine receptors, but provides literally nothing else of value for your life.
They spent their entire childhood doing nothing but becoming solitary Dopamine addicts, while their parents allowed it. Millions of them.
Yup. Prior to video games no one wasted hours a day staring at the TV, or listening to the radio, or reading the newspaper, with nothing to show for it… no one talked on the phone for hours a day just to gossip with nothing to show for it… but lets lump all of that technology in together since the printing press was invented together with the evil video games and go back a bit further…
Surely back in those wonderful times no one was wasting their lives on useless things. No one drank away their day with nothing to show for it… no one sat around telling pointless stories to anyone who was bored and willing to listen. Kids didnt waste their time drawing in the sand or playing in the mud. It was nothing but hard work and learning back in the good ol days.
It’s not the same. Until fairly recently, TV only had a few channels, and most of the day it was showing stuff that no kid would be interested in - talk shows, game shows, soap operas, etc. Every afternoon, every station would show a three hour block of soap operas. EVERY station. So for that block, if you weren’t in school, you had NOTHING to watch.
So you went outside, found your friends, went on a bike ride, played a board game, or maybe just went “exploring,” just to see what you could find. I would do that MOST days as a kid.
Today, of course, you are right. Between cable and streaming, most kids have a LOT to distract them on TV, but it wasn’t always that way.
My son escaped the lure of video games, and anime, but he loves movies, so he spent a lot of time in front of the television, but he became a bonafide cinephile. He has actually been carefully curating his TV watching since he was a teen, searching out the best classic movies, and building a database of films.
Now he’s gone back to college for film studies, and his time in front of the TV, carefully watching high quality content, has put him miles ahead of his peers. His film classes often feature the prof and him having a discussion about a movie, as the rest of the class listens, and the faculty is starting to pay extra close attention to him. They’ve clearly pegged him as a future professional in their industry, because he is so obviously far ahead of every other student. And that’s because he didn’t waste his time as a teen on things like video games and social media, and actually used that time to learn something that would be useful to his future.
BTW, I didn’t push him away or toward anything, I let him choose his own path, and supported him. It was his personal choice to not play video games or do social media. He just wasn’t interested. From the time he discovered what a movie was, he was hooked.
So If he was interested in video games, you would have supported that?
Because, you are right, it’s parental failure that’s the problem.
I think your comments are a bit confusing because they mostly seems to blame the tendency for kids to enjoy the fun things, rather than feature the parent’s responsibility to regulate those things to an appropriate level.
Parental regulation in the old days was telling kids to get out of the house, and don’t come back in until whatever the next meal was. I’d leave on my bike in the morning, with no idea where I was going, so my mom certainly didn’t know. Or care. Sometimes I’d come home for lunch, sometimes not. Always home by 5 for dinner, though.
I’d leave on my bike with empty pockets, no money, no ID, no phone, no watch, nothing. If I got thirsty, I’d knock on a door and ask for a glass of water. Or the time. Sometimes a kid would knock on our door and ask for a glass of water. Or the time. And we’d give it to them. That was parental supervision in the old days.
I actually bought a video game console, and we played some. He was in Cub Scouts, and all the kids there were fanatics. They would even have Cub Scout parties where the kids would bring their consoles and favorite games to play, and he couldn’t really participate much, because he was the only kid who didn’t play video games (I was trying to get them to get together for star-watching parties with telescopes, but they all though that was dumb, including the parents. Scouts has changed a lot). So I tried to encourage him to play, just to be able to relate to these other kids.
He loved Legos, and he loved Star Wars, so I got him a Lego Star Wars game, and he played to the very end, closed it, and walked away. Didn’t ask for another one, didn’t start looking into what other games they had, etc. Just stopped. I kept playing for a while (I like shoot’em ups like Call of Duty and Medal of Honor), but I like video games too much, I could EASILY get hooked, so I generally avoid them. We still have the console in a box somewhere. I recently asked him if he wanted it, and he said No.
He’s always been self-regulating. No drugs, no smoking, no alcohol, no pregnancy scares, nothing. Always chose to hang out with other smart, mature kids (who also weren’t into video games or social media either). Hanging with him and his friends was like talking to adults. When I got around other kids his age, I would be startled at how childish they were.
He was pretty much a dream kid, I got super lucky.
Raising kids is easy. Just love what they love, and they’ll love you. And if they love you, they’ll trust you, and truly understand that you are just trying to help them stay alive, and will mostly cooperate with that agenda.
That’s what’s fun about this, conversations start, and branch off. If it interests you, stick around. If not, move on. That’s how Conversations work, vs. Lectures, which I have been known to do, as well.
Not a Boomer, but I don’t understand how following a conversational thread is “Boomer.” Don’t you understand how conversations work? When you are with your friends, do you generally declare a topic, then scold them if they wander off topic?
Because that’s not how friendly conversations work. You never really know where they’ll lead, and that’s what’s enjoyable about them. The guy sitting at the table and telling people to stay on topic is a real buzzkill, and right now, that’s YOU.
Parents are just grateful to not be disturbed i think. They are also exhausted from their lives, working full time.
The system is designed this way, because then those people become good consumers for the corporations. They fill their emotional void with stuff the system sells. Games, movies.
And then you have the hypersexualized movies, designed so people will jerk off. There is also a reason behind all that. For Instagram, its profit motives but it goes hand in hand with what the system wants - passive consumers with no energy to change their lives for the better.
Valid. Multiple income households are often necessary today, and it isn’t just mom & dad both working, it often means second jobs or side hustles in addition to the primary jobs. It leaves kids alone a lot, and when the parents are home, they are too tired to resist.
It’s Bread & Circuses, and in the 21st century, screens provide the Circuses.
And video games. MANY people play video games for hours, every day. Imagine what else they could be learning, or doing, in that time. When they graduate from college, they will have played hundreds, perhaps thousands, of hours of video games, and have nothing to show for it. They could have learned to play a musical instrument, or learned a language, or learned to code, or how to repair cars, or had a job, or started an online business, or a relationship with another person, or gotten in shape, or developed interpersonal communication skills, etc.
But they spent their time alone, staring at a screen, playing a game that rewards their dopamine receptors, but provides literally nothing else of value for your life.
They spent their entire childhood doing nothing but becoming solitary Dopamine addicts, while their parents allowed it. Millions of them.
Ok Dad, not like people rotted in front of TVs hours a day, that never happened.
Yup. Prior to video games no one wasted hours a day staring at the TV, or listening to the radio, or reading the newspaper, with nothing to show for it… no one talked on the phone for hours a day just to gossip with nothing to show for it… but lets lump all of that technology in together since the printing press was invented together with the evil video games and go back a bit further…
Surely back in those wonderful times no one was wasting their lives on useless things. No one drank away their day with nothing to show for it… no one sat around telling pointless stories to anyone who was bored and willing to listen. Kids didnt waste their time drawing in the sand or playing in the mud. It was nothing but hard work and learning back in the good ol days.
It’s not the same. Until fairly recently, TV only had a few channels, and most of the day it was showing stuff that no kid would be interested in - talk shows, game shows, soap operas, etc. Every afternoon, every station would show a three hour block of soap operas. EVERY station. So for that block, if you weren’t in school, you had NOTHING to watch.
So you went outside, found your friends, went on a bike ride, played a board game, or maybe just went “exploring,” just to see what you could find. I would do that MOST days as a kid.
Today, of course, you are right. Between cable and streaming, most kids have a LOT to distract them on TV, but it wasn’t always that way.
My son escaped the lure of video games, and anime, but he loves movies, so he spent a lot of time in front of the television, but he became a bonafide cinephile. He has actually been carefully curating his TV watching since he was a teen, searching out the best classic movies, and building a database of films.
Now he’s gone back to college for film studies, and his time in front of the TV, carefully watching high quality content, has put him miles ahead of his peers. His film classes often feature the prof and him having a discussion about a movie, as the rest of the class listens, and the faculty is starting to pay extra close attention to him. They’ve clearly pegged him as a future professional in their industry, because he is so obviously far ahead of every other student. And that’s because he didn’t waste his time as a teen on things like video games and social media, and actually used that time to learn something that would be useful to his future.
BTW, I didn’t push him away or toward anything, I let him choose his own path, and supported him. It was his personal choice to not play video games or do social media. He just wasn’t interested. From the time he discovered what a movie was, he was hooked.
So If he was interested in video games, you would have supported that?
Because, you are right, it’s parental failure that’s the problem.
I think your comments are a bit confusing because they mostly seems to blame the tendency for kids to enjoy the fun things, rather than feature the parent’s responsibility to regulate those things to an appropriate level.
Parental regulation in the old days was telling kids to get out of the house, and don’t come back in until whatever the next meal was. I’d leave on my bike in the morning, with no idea where I was going, so my mom certainly didn’t know. Or care. Sometimes I’d come home for lunch, sometimes not. Always home by 5 for dinner, though.
I’d leave on my bike with empty pockets, no money, no ID, no phone, no watch, nothing. If I got thirsty, I’d knock on a door and ask for a glass of water. Or the time. Sometimes a kid would knock on our door and ask for a glass of water. Or the time. And we’d give it to them. That was parental supervision in the old days.
I actually bought a video game console, and we played some. He was in Cub Scouts, and all the kids there were fanatics. They would even have Cub Scout parties where the kids would bring their consoles and favorite games to play, and he couldn’t really participate much, because he was the only kid who didn’t play video games (I was trying to get them to get together for star-watching parties with telescopes, but they all though that was dumb, including the parents. Scouts has changed a lot). So I tried to encourage him to play, just to be able to relate to these other kids.
He loved Legos, and he loved Star Wars, so I got him a Lego Star Wars game, and he played to the very end, closed it, and walked away. Didn’t ask for another one, didn’t start looking into what other games they had, etc. Just stopped. I kept playing for a while (I like shoot’em ups like Call of Duty and Medal of Honor), but I like video games too much, I could EASILY get hooked, so I generally avoid them. We still have the console in a box somewhere. I recently asked him if he wanted it, and he said No.
He’s always been self-regulating. No drugs, no smoking, no alcohol, no pregnancy scares, nothing. Always chose to hang out with other smart, mature kids (who also weren’t into video games or social media either). Hanging with him and his friends was like talking to adults. When I got around other kids his age, I would be startled at how childish they were.
He was pretty much a dream kid, I got super lucky.
Raising kids is easy. Just love what they love, and they’ll love you. And if they love you, they’ll trust you, and truly understand that you are just trying to help them stay alive, and will mostly cooperate with that agenda.
This story, through your chain of comments, has really gone off the rails from the post topic, that’s for sure.
That’s what’s fun about this, conversations start, and branch off. If it interests you, stick around. If not, move on. That’s how Conversations work, vs. Lectures, which I have been known to do, as well.
LOL. There it is.
I knew you were a boomer, but now you’ve gone an’ done boomed.
Not a Boomer, but I don’t understand how following a conversational thread is “Boomer.” Don’t you understand how conversations work? When you are with your friends, do you generally declare a topic, then scold them if they wander off topic?
Because that’s not how friendly conversations work. You never really know where they’ll lead, and that’s what’s enjoyable about them. The guy sitting at the table and telling people to stay on topic is a real buzzkill, and right now, that’s YOU.
Parents are just grateful to not be disturbed i think. They are also exhausted from their lives, working full time.
The system is designed this way, because then those people become good consumers for the corporations. They fill their emotional void with stuff the system sells. Games, movies.
And then you have the hypersexualized movies, designed so people will jerk off. There is also a reason behind all that. For Instagram, its profit motives but it goes hand in hand with what the system wants - passive consumers with no energy to change their lives for the better.
Valid. Multiple income households are often necessary today, and it isn’t just mom & dad both working, it often means second jobs or side hustles in addition to the primary jobs. It leaves kids alone a lot, and when the parents are home, they are too tired to resist.
It’s Bread & Circuses, and in the 21st century, screens provide the Circuses.