The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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I have a 7 year old. He's never played a video game outside of a DIY version of online chess against me.
I notice a lot of kids play Minecraft. I've never played it. This is a little odd since the entire reason I have a career is because I wanted to get into game development and learned to program C.
I would like to expose him to video games since I believe they have upside, but I'm pretty worried modern games are crack and educational benefits or whatever are oversold and not real.
He has an excellent attention span right now and we play a lot of card (MTG) and board games (Catan Jr) and I don't want to ruin that. Other families say once their kids play video games they stop caring about all of that other stuff and see their attention spans go to shit.
We homeschool him so he's not exactly surrounded by other kids trying to relate to him re: games but it's only a matter of time.
Don't.
Treat video games as you would sugary drinks, staying up past midnight, sleeping until mid morning. Delay the acceptance of these habits as long as possible, until the likelihood of them becoming habits dwindles and a certain ability to self-regulate has developed. The trade-off is simply not worth it.
I never played video games growing up (well we didn't have them, although I played Adventure and Pong on my friend's Atari), nor even was I allowed in principle to buy comic books, which were seen as brain rotting by my parents. By the time I could buy them on my own I just wasn't that interested.
Others may disagree. My sons now are fixed to their phones and often playing some game which, because of its design, not only pulls in their attention but cannot be, as in the old days, simply paused, without suffering some in-game loss. Predictable tension occasionally ensues.
In any case the toothpaste will make its way out of the tube, it's only a matter of time. In Japan I'd never homeschool as the socialization aspect of school is vital to functioning in society, but I am no longer very savvy how anything works in the US.
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