Why kids love video games and why parents hate them?

This question is the easiest to answer but the hardest to solve.

"Many kids, on a minute-to-minute basis, are told what to do, what to wear, what activities they can or can't do," says Warren Buckleitner, editor of Children's Software Revue. “When they get their hands on a mouse or a game controller, they can do things that they may not be able to do in the real word”, he notes. “Such as race cars, explore haunted houses, play sports with the pros — heavy stuff for a 5-year-old.”

Games that kids love and parents don't
This is one side of the picture, the kids side. But what about the parents? Why don’t we want to give our kids what they want? The answer here, from my experience is that it is our first experience in being equal to our kids and maybe even inferior, instead of being the superior omnipotent parents that we are all the time. When it comes to video games, we have to learn the rules from scratch just like they do, we can’t come and teach them how to play, since we never played these games in the past. We usually can’t use our experience, power and knowledge to beat them easily like we can in Scrabble, baseball or Chess. Furthermore, their little hands are getting much faster in using the controllers and their little minds are faster grasping the odd display and rules.

How do they control it?

The problem is simple; on one hand we have kids that have too much control (they can use a gun, they can drive a car, they can hit people, they can jump from building...), and on the other hand we have us, the parents, with too little control (we can’t out run them in the races, we rarely can beat them in the fighting or shooting games...). What can we do? Should we avoid these situations by either let the kids play on their own, or maybe not play video games at all? Or can we still find the way to participate with our kids in their new world, help them to learn and grow, direct them in their first years, prepare them better to the world outside our loving family house. Can we avoid the arguments and building distance between us? I think that the answer is Yes, and that reading this guide can help you find that magic path.