This is funny.

Read this first.

It is yet another story of a mom blaming her lack of parental skills and involvement on a video game system.

Look at that picture, the mom and her kids all cherubic in their innocence, before the blasphemous demonic forces of the big N came in to their house.

Could it be that the mom tried to use one small handheld gaming system as a babysitter for four kids?

Or maybe she doesn’t really understand gaming; children often don’t like having one tiny system to share amongst themselves.

Maybe it is a cultural thing, this woman is British after all. Call me a barbaric Americano, but honestly I would have spanked the kids in question. They don’t want to play nice? Fine, I could use another Nintendo DS. I have friends who could be playing Pokemon against me…

What it boils down to is this woman is blaming a game system for lack of parenting. She seems to do a good job without the system (According to her, at any rate.) Her kids play instruments, read, work on homework..do all the things ‘normal’ children do.

The funny thing is I did all that as a child and still grew up..well not normal but I made it in to adulthood. I still read, I still play an instrument, I still do my homework (You know, keeping REcomic updated heh.) I still play video games.

We had a video game system in my house from as far back as I can remember. If I ever moaned and complained about it, like the children do in this article, my mom would bring up the fact that she bought the system and can take it away at any time. And she did on occasion..among other punishments.

I know, in this modern age we don’t punish our children. That is SO 1980’s.

However, two of the three men on this site are Parents, they have children, and they have children that like to play video games. If they were in this same situation? Neither of them would react the same way. No debate, no “if you do this I’ll give in…”

Here is the thing: The goal of parenting isn’t to be your child’s friend. It isn’t to be mom or dad of the year by giving your kids trinkets. You become that through loving your family and being a good parent. Your goal as a parent raise your children to adulthood as decent human beings.

However, if you can’t control your kids? Blame Nintendo, that is the easiest way out.

- Warren

This entry was posted on Monday, May 5th, 2008 at 1:06 pm and is filed under Gaming, Handheld, Sections. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.