Video Game Break: Head Outside

The spring thaw is on, and now that we are getting at least one warm day each week I am encouraging my kids to get back outside and play.

I had enough when the mercury hit a balmy 82 degrees last week and my kids had some friends over and they all dove right for the video games.  So I did what most parents would do and told them to go outside.

 My daughter and her friend were out and back in before my younger son and his friend finally broke away from their games to head outdoors.

“How come they don’t have to go outside?” he asked, not knowing that my daughter and her friend had already been out, climbed a tree, and come back in for a drink of water. 

My response was: “I didn’t know that going outside was a punishment, you are a kid!”

Times sure have changed.  When my brother and I were kids, we would play outside all day, only coming in for a few minutes to wolf down our dinner and then running right back outside to play until dark.  Of course, back then we didn’t have the strong lure of video games that now competes with outside play.  We only had Atari Pong, which was about as exciting as watching paint dry.

But now video games are so life-like and exciting with all of their bells and whistles, that it is hard to drag any child away from the intense HD action. 

I thought about having a “no video game day” like the “no TV night” that we experimented with a couple of months ago.  But, after my husband and I talked about it, we decided instead to limit the amount of video games our kids played per day. We now allow them to play games until dinner, and then they are off the gaming consoles for the rest of the evening.  That limits them to about two hours per day, which is an amount we feel comfortable.

But I recently realized that I may have a new problem. Just as we got our kids adjusted to a schedule with their gaming, I am discovering that once they go to bed, someone else is now picking up the controller and is getting hooked himself on video games. My own husband!  He even got his own Xbox Live account.  I guess I won’t panic too much yet, but in the back of my mind, I’m already working on a strategy for how we can limit his play just in case he stops wanting to go outside to as well.