Parent Company

We are the last people I know of with kids in the house who don’t own a gaming system.  No Wii, Xbox, PlayStation 1, 2, or 3. Which makes our house a not-so-desirable destination.

If we brought home a system and didn’t put restrictions on its use, at least one of our children would be permanently affixed to the controls. It’s not that we are anti-gaming, we just don’t have the bandwidth to add another device to our house that needs constant rationing and monitoring. And last time I looked, Madden 2010 wasn’t part of any core curriculum or scholarship fund. 

So I took a straw poll at a recent dinner party with friends who had boys, all of whom had gaming sytems of one sort or another.  I asked the advice of these experts: “Knowing what you know now after buying a Wii, Xbox, or whatever, would you do it again?” Unilateral response – “No!  Hold out as long as you can!”

At our recent annual physical, our doctor gave us some wise advice: the 5-2-1 rule: eat 5 fruits and vegetables a day, spend no more than a total of 2 hours a day on screens (TVs, computers, games, phone texting, combined), and engage in 1 hour of daily physical activity. Sounds sensible … we are probably at 1-2-.5 right now, but at least we have a goal!

Since the 2 hours in this house is already used up on computers, I’m not sure what rationing system we would have to devise to squeeze in gaming. So for now, a gaming system is not in the cards. If the kids want to play a game, they can grab a badminton racket or actual cards, for that matter.

Have any of our readers had good or bad experiences with having these gaming systems in the house?