A youthful family member recently explained the whole concept of Wii.
With a vision of long ago street kickball games replaying against the back of my eyelids, I asked why the kid just didn't round up a couple of friends, go outside and play?
Pretty much a blank stare, followed by pumped up energy on how much fun Wii was, how everyone had a Wii and I could even play online with other people, you know, if I really wanted to.
Nintendo is one smart bird, figuring out a way to climate-control play, fight back against child obesity linked to inactive children while simutaneously relieving parents of any guilt associated with keeping their kids within tracking range.
Wii has tapped into overparenting.
Although helicopter parenting has been around for years, TIME explores The Growing Backlash Against Overparenting (Nancy Gibbs, 11/20/2009).
The insanity crept up on us slowly; we just wanted what was best for our kids.
We bought macrobiotic cupcakes and hypoallergenic socks, hired tutors to correct a 5-year-old's "pencil-holding deficiency," hooked up broadband connections in the treehouse but took down the swing set after the second skinned knee. We hovered over every school, playground and practice field — "helicopter parents," teachers christened us, a phenomenon that spread to parents of all ages, races and regions. Stores began marketing stove-knob covers and "Kinderkords" (also known as leashes; they allow "three full feet of freedom for both you and your child") and Baby Kneepads (as if babies don't come prepadded). The mayor of a Connecticut town agreed to chop down three hickory trees on one block after a woman worried that a stray nut might drop into her new swimming pool, where her nut-allergic grandson occasionally swam. A Texas school required parents wanting to help with the second-grade holiday party to have a background check first. Schools auctioned off the right to cut the carpool line and drop a child directly in front of the building — a spot that in other settings is known as handicapped parking.
Step away from the Wii , step outside the 24/7 news cycle that slams home the horrors of the world to the front doorstep in the name of high ratings and simply think. Lenore Skenazy (the mom who allowed her son to ride the NYC subway alone) writes a bit about parental rationality in her blog, Free Range Kids:
.(...)Read the TIME article in its entirety here.
There is no rational reason, she argues, that a generation of parents who grew up walking alone to school, riding mass transit, trick-or-treating, teeter-tottering and selling Girl Scout cookies door to door should be forbidding their kids to do the same. But somehow, she says, "10 is the new 2. We're infantilizing our kids into incompetence." She celebrates seat belts and car seats and bike helmets and all the rational advances in child safety. It's the irrational responses that make her crazy, like when Dear Abby endorses the idea, as she did in August, that each morning before their kids leave the house, parents take a picture of them. That way, if they are kidnapped, the police will have a fresh photo showing what clothes they were wearing. Once the kids make it home safe and sound, you can delete the picture and take a new one the next morning.That advice may seem perfectly sensible to parents bombarded by heartbreaking news stories about missing little girls and the predator next door. But too many parents, says Skenazy, have the math all wrong. Refusing to vaccinate your children, as millions now threaten to do in the case of the swine flu, is statistically reckless; on the other hand, there are no reports of a child ever being poisoned by a stranger handing out tainted Halloween candy, and the odds of being kidnapped and killed by a stranger are about 1 in 1.5 million. When parents confront you with "How can you let him go to the store alone?," she suggests countering with "How can you let him visit your relatives?" (Some 80% of kids who are molested are victims of friends or relatives.) Or ride in the car with you? (More than 430,000 kids were injured in motor vehicles last year.) "I'm not saying that there is no danger in the world or that we shouldn't be prepared," she says. "But there is good and bad luck and fate and things beyond our ability to change. The way kids learn to be resourceful is by having to use their resources." Besides, she says with a smile, "a 100%-safe world is not only impossible. It's nowhere you'd want to be."
And afterwards, go paint four bases out on the street. I'd recommend fluorescent orange. The street lights super-illuminate the diamond for kids involved in sudden death kickball, who just can't let the game go because the sun chose to set at the most inopportune moment.
