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Cry Me a River
My wife and I have five kids. We started with three boys and then, once we'd officially learned the basics, went on to have twin girls. I thought I knew how to parent, but going from males to females was like going from basic math to trigonometry.
I …Read more.
Cat Craze
I have a confession to make. I am afraid of cats.
I'm not afraid that they'll attack me or sneak up in the middle of the night and suffocate me (as they have been known to do to babies for centuries — look it up on the Internet).
I'm afraid …Read more.
Money to Burn
Yesterday, over my morning coffee, I read in my paper that parents in New York City are all atwitter because tuitions at most private schools are just about to creep up past the $40,000 mark. I stared at the story for a full minute before it hit me: …Read more.
Tweenage Dream
Like almost every other American household this year, our home ended up after the holidays with a lot of new electronic items. I got an iPad. It was one of those gifts you don't know you want until you have it. Suddenly, I could check my email and …Read more.
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Out of ControlFor years at our house, we have had teenaged boys and video games. As any parent can tell you, the average boy can play the average video game until the average parent goes out of his or her average mind. Boys never, ever get tired of sitting on the couch, hunched over a plastic controller, running through fake landscapes and shooting high-powered weapons. To be fair, they have to get ready for college, where they will expected to master those skills while simultaneously drinking beer. But while they're still under our roof and under our control, it's always been a trade-off. We want the boys to be happy and don't want to be mean parents. But we also are afraid of raising blithering idiots — who can do nothing except fight pretend battles in virtual worlds, will never acquire any kind of usable skill and will live with us forever. I am deathly afraid of discovering an unemployed 45-year-old in my basement. So, we've worked out a system of hide and seek. When we wanted the boys to play video games, we gave them the controllers. And when we wanted them to stop, we collected the controllers and hid them somewhere in the house. We found that unless we actually hid the controller, they would play when we're not looking and — this is hard to believe — lie to us about it. We've been fighting this battle for years. Somewhere in the corner of our basement are the carcasses of video games past: Nintendo NES, Nintendo 64 and PS2. There might even be a Pong in there. All were the subject of prolonged parental warfare. Our middle son, now in college, got sick of our restrictions when he lived at home. He moved on to the computer, playing online games and corresponding with other people who played online games. We couldn't take away his controller, but we did take his keyboard, giving it back only when he needed his computer for homework. I tried buying him a computer chess game, figuring it would be a nice compromise between fun and intellectual development. I offered to let him play computer chess as much as he wanted, prompting a "Gee, thanks Dad!" that still holds the North American record for sarcasm. When our youngest son was small, we even used to make a game of it.
These days, we're too old to play games, and our now 15-year-old son begins demanding his controller from his cell phone as he steps off the school bus on Fridays. He feels he has to get as much video gaming in during the weekend as he can, because he knows that Sunday right around dinner, my wife will take the controller away, and he won't see it again until next Friday afternoon. Last Sunday night, I wandered down to the basement and noticed all kinds of junk on the coffee table. There were controllers from just about every game system we'd ever had, all strewn about. Clearly, I thought, my son had been rustling through all the old equipment, maybe in hopes of selling some of this junk as antiques. I went upstairs. "Did you take away the controller for the week?" I asked my wife. She said yes and had found a hiding place she was particularly proud of. I thought about it for a moment, then I went upstairs to where my son was sitting on his bed, playing guitar. "Let me guess," I said. "You know Mom doesn't know an Xbox from an Atari." He sat there, frozen, the way somebody does when they're afraid of what's coming next. "And," I continued, "you figured that if you threw a lot of decoy controllers around the room, she'd never know which one was the real one, and chances are she'd confiscate an obsolete controller." He gave me that look you see when someone does something bad but is secretly proud. "Pretty ingenious," I said, nodding in a way that parents do when they're pretending to be proud but are really ticked off. "Congratulations, you get to keep the controller all week!" He smiled. I did too, thinking about how he'd run downstairs when we were gone, eager to play his game. And how he'd frown when he realized that he had the controller, but the game console was now gone. To find out more about Peter McKay, please visit www.creators.com. COPYRIGHT 2010 CREATORS.COM
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