My Son: Super Mario Addict

I'm not going to get any Father of the Year awards for how I'm raising any of my kids, but that is especially true when it comes to my five-year-old and how I am handling his Wii Super Mario Brothers addiction. Today was an especially difficult day, as he was throwing fits pretty consistently for about two hours.

Everything would be fine if I just let him play it the way he wants to. He likes to play the easy levels, and occasionally try a more difficult level. After he gets tired of that, he goes back to the easy levels. But he likes me to play with him, and I like a challenge in a video game. I don't like many video games anymore, but I do like to gradually improve, and I like the games to get more difficult as I improve. This is why I still much prefer the old Links golf game on the PC over Tiger Woods on Playstation or Wii. The Tiger game has it backwards in that the better you get, the easier the game becomes. On the Links game, it's more like computer chess - once you get better, you get bored with the "easy" setting, and move to the more difficult "Pro" or "Championship" settings.

Anyway, I should have stuck to my guns when telling my son to calm down or else I'd stop the game. But I choose instead to try to reason with him while he's throwing the fits, even though it seems pretty traumatic. I love how competitive he is, and I love how no matter how upset he gets, he doesn't want to quit. I do think he'll outgrow this, and since I can relate (remembering my own life-long, self-competitive temper tendancies), I hope I can help him just by letting him play through it.

I do need to limit his time playing the game. It helps that skating lessons start up again tomorrow night, and he still enjoys that more than Super Mario Brothers. I hope that never changes.