One week without iPad and Xbox

A story about a 5 year old kid being a 5 year old kid

I am a typical geek dad and I always thought that using devices such as TV, Videogames and computers would make my son a smarter kid and practicing sports would make him healthier too. But apparently, I was wrong. At least, partially wrong. What started as a way for me and my wife have dinner without interruptions, quickly became a habit to all of us. The TV, iPad or the Xbox would be our way to get some peaceful time. And this was our big mistake.

So there I was, seated by the dinner table, watching my 5 year old son break his promise not to ride his skateboard inside the apartment. We (me and my wife) could not let this go. He was literally ignoring what we agreed before and we would have to punish him after that. Which we did. Not physically but we told him that he was prohibited to ride his skateboard until next week. And then he answered:

“OK. I don’t care”

“Oh! Is that so? A week without Xbox and iPad too”, we told him.

Then he realized that he was in deep sh*t and started to cry and asked us what he should do then.

“Well, you could get back to drawing since it is something that you love so much and you haven’t been doing this for a while”

“OK…” he replied.

Don’t get me wrong, my son is a very active kid. He goes to school in the morning and then plays soccer, practices Judo and swimming every afternoon (at least one sport per day). He also watches TV and plays with his toys and with the computers and videogames that we have at home.

Four days later, my wife told me that he was calmer now. He was drawing a lot and he was less irritated with everything. A nicer kid. And we noticed it.

We took him to the park near our old apartment, we played with him and watched him play alone and with other kids. He climbed trees, played with a frisbee and ran a lot. He was just a regular kid playing outdoors.

It seemed like the games on the iPad and Xbox were making him a more competitive child and the winning/losing mechanism was changing his way to see the world. He was learning how to persevere and keep trying until he succeeded. This was the good part but on the other side since “winning” was good and “losing”, bad, enjoying the moment or the ride was never as pleasurable for him. He had to win always. Unfortunately, this was making him a kid that couldn’t deal with negatives. And this is a bad thing when you try to educate a child.

He tried to use my iPad during this period but after we reminded him that he couldn’t, he seemed ok with that idea and went back to his drawings.

After this week, everything went fine and he got the chance to play the iPad and Xbox games again. He had fun every single minute playing it. But this whole thing made us realize that we should have more control of when and for how long he could use these devices.

The best part of this whole experience was that yesterday he told us the following phrase:

“Mom, Dad, thank you for taking the iPad and the videogame from me. This made me draw a lot again and I love it.”

To be honest, I think this just confirmed what we always knew: kids and videogames should be closely supervised and monitored. Not only because of violent games or anything like that. My son doesn’t play this type of games. But because it takes the children out of their natural habitat and regular way of thinking. It seems to be too much abstraction for them to manage by themselves.

My son still plays his games, watch videos on YouTube or Netflix but always with some adult supervision and for a limited time.

He now understands that iPad and videogames are not supposed to be used all the time and that his other activities are great too.

This whole experience just reinforced an analogy that a friend of mine always told me about parenthood:

“Being a parent is like playing a videogame, when you think you know everything about it, you go to a different phase which you don’t know nothing and you have to re-learn everything.”