I have to preface this by saying that when my first two children were really young, video games were not an issue. We had none.
As our family grew, we watched other members of our family play with them, and still we held firm.
Fastforward several years, and we’ve caved, like many other people.
The video games have never been an issue for my daughter. She plays occasionally for her younger brothers. For my sons, however, it has been an issue—a bad issue.
We had to take issue.
So, we did the unusual. We promised them a new video game system for Christmas if they could go without all video games for 4 months.
Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? (Don’t blame me; it was my husbands idea.)
Why reward them with more games?
I know, I know, I know.
But I promise you it changed their lives.
They succeeded in giving up the games for four months, but they gained so much much more.
Initially, they went through withdrawals. (Yes, it was bad.)
But then, after a couple of weeks, they began to look for other ways to distract themselves.
The results were amazing.
My oldest son who is now 15 was 13 at the time. He had been taking piano lessons from the age of 3. He hated it.
Well, without the distraction of video games that hate has turned to love. So much so that I have to holler at him to stop playing the piano. I wake up with the theme to superman flying through my mind. I keep telling myself I wanted him to play. I wanted him to play. I wanted him to play.
Well, now, he’s still playing, and he’s loving it. He wants to major in music. And even though he has access to video games again, his passion for music has surpassed his interest in video games.
For my 11 year old, the change was more subtle, probably because he had a huge growth spurt at the same time so he slept most of the time away. But when he wasn’t sleeping or eating, he was reading for pleasure. For a homeschooling mom, that’s a dream come true. And he’s still reading! He loves to read, and until the video games were taken away, that wasn’t happening.
For my nine year old, the change has been less permanent. I imagine it’s because he has so much growing to do; however, we learned something amazing about him during that four month period.
Not only does he love playing chess and other board games, he loves to design them.
Mind you, these are the most boring repetitive games you have ever seen. But they are his! And he made them. He made all of the parts from clay, including the dice. He drew his board on white paper, and made the entire thing by himself.
He took all of that creativity he was pouring into board games and those 3D experiences he was having with videos, and brought that into his real lilfe experiences.
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