Alien54's Journal: The Damn Parents Today

Whil Wheaton on the gaming generation as Parents: Now don't get me wrong: I love gaming. I love technology. In fact, I almost wrote a column this week all about the majesty of handeld games in the 70s and 80s (Merlin and Mattel D&D FTW!) and when I was younger, I took my Mattel Football and then Gameboy just about everywhere with me, but my parents gave me limits, (I didn't miss Old Faithful erupting because I was playing Tetris, for example) and they certainly never brought our Atari 2600 with us on a vacation. I've been ruminating on this for some time, but I've recently concluded that there is, in fact, an entire generation of parents, about my age or just a little older, who are substituting technology for parenting. As a result, there's an entire generation of children who are overstimulated and undersocialized, and in some cases heavily medicated, because their damn parents would rather distract them with a DVD or video game than, you know, interact with them. Is this the new way we're supposed to raise emotionally healthy and well adjusted kids? I must have missed a memo, because these people are everywhere.

People have kids for the wrong reasons

[spun]

Then they regret it. Feeling vaguely unfulfilled with your life is not a good reason. Because society tells you to is not a good reason. Wanting to have someone utterly dependent on you who will love you unconditionally is definitely not a good reason.

So these schlubs have kids, but they don't really want them. What do you expect them to do? They've already proven themselves incapable of making good decisions by having the kid in the first place. In the old days, if they were rich, they'd just foist the kid