Friday, April 20, 2007

Kids and games these days

As a post on the Economist blog Free Exchange says, it's a truism of parenting and cultural commentary today that kids are endangered by certain media-driven trends. The primary worries among many seem to be, says the blogger:

1. Girl's [sic] clothing is far too sexualised, especially for the under-13 set.

2. Boys play too many video games.

3. They all watch too much television.

What to do? As Free Exchange points out, parents of a certain kind find themselves presented with a dilemma, like Laura McKenna at 11D:

Before Christmas, Steve and I went through major soul searching about whether or not we should get the boys the big video game systems. We relented and picked up one of the cheaper models, a Game Cube. We decided that it wasn't worth turning our kids into a social lepers, because of our high minded, intellectual beliefs. Well, the Game Cube isn't enough, because the boys all have the deluxe models and the portable games, too. Do we buy more video games, so that Jonah gains some hand in the social dance of elementary school?

The social dance of elementary school!

The parallel debate a couple decades ago was whether intellectual parents should cave and let the children watch TV at will. Stakes seem higher now that video games tend to feature pimps killing prostitutes as much as Super Marios saving the day.

Lauren Mechling had a kind of counterargument in her recent piece in Ideas. She notices that children's libraries are now stocked with Xbox video game systems and rap albums, but also observes that libraries have been able to slip a little medicine in with the candy: kids come to the library for cheap thrills and actually end up reading. A solution of a kind to pup-culture saturation: combine, combine, combine.

Posted by Evan Hughes at 12:52 PM

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