Midlife Mom

Navigating the teen years… and beyond
About Rebecca Haynes

Archive for January, 2011

Advanced technology?

Friday, January 7, 2011 by:Rebecca Haynes
Comment
Comments
|
|

Do you ever feel like you want to take the video game remote and flush it down the toilet? Or send it hurling into outer space?

Are there times when you want to confiscate the cell phone to stop the texting? Or hide the laptop to cut down on social networking and encourage actual face-to-face interaction?

These days it seems as though technology and its gadgets get a lot of our attention. Sure, they keep us connected. But what about the disconnect they cause? Families might be together — in body only. Our minds often are elsewhere as we’re checking e-mails, keeping up with Facebook posts, texting a question we expect an immediate response to and playing video games. When you send a text to tell a member of your family that dinner’s ready, you know you’re in trouble!

So how do you stop the cycle? How do you get your family to pay attention to each other — face to face?
HealthyLife will run a feature on this dilemma in its next issue and we’d love to hear from you. How do you do battle against the technology machine in your own home? Send us your stories. Some of them just might end up in the magazine!

Mom vs. machine

Wednesday, January 5, 2011 by:Rebecca Haynes
Comment
Comments
|
|

We were holdouts. My husband and I refused to buy a video game system despite the repeated pleas from our boys and the proclamations that we were the only family in town that didn’t have a Nintendo.

Monitoring TV time was already problematic. Why would we want to provide the kids with something that would just plop them in front of the TV screen even more? Wasn’t it better to encourage them to play outside? Play with their friends? Use their imaginations?

This went on for several years — their pleas falling on deaf ears, I mean. Then one day, our oldest (I think he was 11 at the time) invited a friend over to play. They were not without multiple ways to fill the time, what with the myriad of toys in the house, a yard, sports equipment and lots of neighborhood friends ready to join in a game of Whiffle ball or touch football. But after only about 20 minutes, I heard my son crying.

“What’s wrong? Where’s your friend?” I asked. “He went home,” my son told me through tears, because “he was bored. We don’t have a Nintendo.”

I was livid. And I felt terrible at the same time. How lazy are our kids becoming when the only way they can be entertained is through a video game system? I wanted to call that boy’s parents and yell at them.

That next Christmas, however, there was a Nintendo under our tree — purchased after the price was slashed because the company was now onto its next system and no longer making the N64s. The games seemed harmless enough — Super Mario and Donkey Kong, games filled with cartoon characters trying to drive or jump their way through obstacles, making it to a more advanced skill level.

But as technology “advances,” one thing leads to another. Those harmless cartoon characters have long since been replaced by realistic looking —and sounding — soldiers and warriors, who shoot, hack and kill people in all kinds of bloody ways.

And this is how society encourages its youth to spend their spare time? I still want no part of it.