[General Discussion] Gaming & Parenting

Since the majority of us are gamers I'm sure we've all seen this situation before from time to time especially during the holiday season.

The situation is that we constantly see parents wanting to purchase a game for their kid, but they have absolutely no idea what to get them especially when the kid is between the ages of 5-10 years old. It boggles my mind sometimes that parents will even pick out games for their games not even knowing or wanting to know the kind of content that a specific game has. Do parents even take into consideration that type of content that they're exposing their kids to.

The reason why I bring this up is that over the Christmas holidays I ran into this similar situation in which a couple was purchasing a game for their 9 year old boy. The 9 year old kid had asked his parents to pick up the game Halo 3. The parents had no idea what kind of game Halo 3 was, but they didn't want to simply buy it unless they knew what the game was about. They were reluctant to buy it because they had noticed the M rating on the game, and despite not getting a straight answer from the clerk at the store of why the game was rated M. I ended up speaking up, I don't know why; probably in my eyes it was the right thing to do. I told them why the game was rated M, but I also told him that even if you don't buy it for him and want to go with a different game because of its content, if his friends already play it more than likely he'll find a way to play it as well no matter how hard you try to restrict these types of games from him.

You know with gaming becoming more and more mainstream with each passing year, there are probably more kids playing games now than what they're have ever been before. We have seen countless studies of how games can influence people at such a young age. It is not about the kind of influence that games can pose in children that I want to pose in this thread.

The question I would like to ask the GFF community is what kind of parent would you be when it comes to your kids and video games. I know a lot of us aren't even parents, but the fact that we grew up on video games for a greater part of our lives it would be interesting to see if we could apply that amount of understand towards gaming as a whole to our offspring.

For me, it is all on a case by case basis. If I feel that my kid is mature enough to handle an m-rated game than I wouldn't have any problems with him/her playing one but I would have to be there to see the type of game they were playing and the gameplay aspects of that game. I sure as hell would want to play some two player action with my kid if they wanted me to. I'm not going to be totally restrictive because I firmly believe that more you restrict someone from doing something, the more likely they're going to do it anyway. I use to watch really violent b-movies as young as 7 years old, but my parents were always there to ask me questions and make me realize that what was going on television was all make believe. I would probably adapt the same philosophy when it comes to me being a parent.

For me the ESRB came out when I was 14 years old, so I would like to think that at that age I was old enough to handle any kind of video game violence. Even now I don't even own very many m-rated games. I think probably as a parent I'd probably push my style of games upon my child, but I'll always be respectful toward what my kid would like to play. My parents never really had an interest in me playing video games, but on occasion my dad would play NHL hockey and Vegas stakes with me on my snes.

To the GFF community what kind of parent would you be when it comes to your kids and video games in general.

Jam it back in, in the dark.