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Video Game Violence, My Girlfriend, and my infant son...- SOLVED!
Sesphoheme
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I need a second opinion on a horrible subject I'm sure.
Vent, Vent, Vent.
So, my son is sitting in a bouncer in the Game Room beside me while I'm playing COD4. My son is just an infant at merely 6 months old. Lately, his mother, my girlfriend, has been being some what of a pain. (She doesn't mind it when I play video games, but don't allow my son to watch VIOLENT ones.)
Okay. She says it's okay to let him watch Viva Pinata, while I play, as opposed to COD4 or any of the Halo games. If you've ever played Viva Pinata, you'd understand why I would actually bring that up in this post.
Anyone else had problems with parents/girlfriends/wives feelings of children watching/playing games with violence? If so, please tell me how you got it to stop... Or, how I might go about putting some flowers or cotton candy in Halo 3.
(PS: I've tried taping it to the TV screen.)
Vent, Vent, Vent.
So, my son is sitting in a bouncer in the Game Room beside me while I'm playing COD4. My son is just an infant at merely 6 months old. Lately, his mother, my girlfriend, has been being some what of a pain. (She doesn't mind it when I play video games, but don't allow my son to watch VIOLENT ones.)
Okay. She says it's okay to let him watch Viva Pinata, while I play, as opposed to COD4 or any of the Halo games. If you've ever played Viva Pinata, you'd understand why I would actually bring that up in this post.
Anyone else had problems with parents/girlfriends/wives feelings of children watching/playing games with violence? If so, please tell me how you got it to stop... Or, how I might go about putting some flowers or cotton candy in Halo 3.
(PS: I've tried taping it to the TV screen.)
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
Sesphoheme on
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I'm not a violent gamer myself, if that's what you mean.
I just play in my leisure, for fun.
Seldom do I cuss or get mad at games...
I've never thought of it that way before.... the speed of the movement and all... I understand your point here. Which means the post is solved.
My baby was born very premature, and he's developing much slower than children his age. (At the rate of a 3 month old, to be exact.) I'd hate to be selfish and jeopardize his well-being, because of a silly feud between my girlfriend and I. I'll at least wait until his vision is a little stronger, to introduce him to games as such.
Thanks for helping, drhazard.
i know this is "solved" but i think the larger problem is that your only caveat about allowing your infant son to watch call of duty is that "the speed of the movement and all" would be too much for a baby. i think the larger issue here which your girlfriend is worried about and that you disagree with is the actual violent content of the game.
granted, it's an infant. there probably isn't a whole lot a baby that young is going to pick up in terms of actual thematics from the game. but do you really want your son exposed to that kind of violence in terms of explosions, screams, and straight up killing people? i'm not usally one to say that watching something violent causes violence, but at some point you have to know what's appropriate, no matter how young your kid is.
your girlfriend is right, call of duty is too violent for your kid to be watching at that age, and the fact that you try and justify things by saying "well he was born premature so its okay, he's not developed enough for me to mess him up yet" is just creepy. the solution isn't "imma gonna wait till his eyes get good enough to easily view me blowing shit up on the tv" it's "hey, maybe i should put the violent video games away while my son is around until he's is old enough to appreciate them in the proper context"
Just wait he's in bed, or play while he's napping in a different part of the house.
Dude, don't expose an infant or small child to a violent game. Even an infant with "strong vision." That's stupid. You wouldn't watch porn with him sitting you next to you on the couch, right?
According to two minutes of Google searching, this says that "No research has focused specifically on how violent content affects infants." However, the consensus about infants and television in general is that children that young are not really able to pick out meaning from the TV unless it is presented in a structured, direct way. If this is true, anything more exciting than Sesame Street or the Teletubbies is probably identical to your kid right now.
It's great that you want to change your lifestyle to accommodate your child, but at least do make decisions in an informed manner based on evidence.
I don't have any experience raising children, but I think the popular age threshold for permitting children to watch tv for an appreciable amount of time is around 2 years. It may not be best for the child's development to be exposed to high-data audio/visual content that it receives passively from a box, while it's still figuring out how to interact with the world. The subject should be studied more, but the available data indicate that over-exposure to tv at too young an age manifests measureable developmental deficits.
You could argue that even WoW isn't acceptable but personally I feel it's ok, anything more realistic / violent than that and I wouldn't let him near it.
I tend to play CoD when he's in bed / out of the house. I usually wear headphones when he's in bed anyway as I don't want to wake him. The office with the PC in is next to his nursery.
Oh, how our children are going to grow up to be geeks.
edit - I read that link Djeet, and I'd agree with it, to an extent. I don't like letting my son watch things like Teletubbies, but he does love Balamory (which is non-animated and very dialogue focused).
the problem here isn't really the effects that call of duty or halo might have on a baby, it's more the idea that the OP doesn't seem to think that exposing his son to violence at any age seems to be a problem as long as the kid can handle the physical stimulation of viewing it. at 6 months there probably isn't much of a risk, but that doesn't mean that when he's two years old it suddenly becomes okay.
the OP needs to realize that kids are impressionable and that yeah, sometimes kids have to be shielded from certain content until they're old enough to understand it.
A. He's 6 months old, with the mind of a 3 month old.
B. Violent vidja games never affected me when I was younger, they didn't affect my brother, and they don't affect my nephew.
(It's not like I sit and allow my child to watch me play "violent" video games all the time. It's an occasional thing.
I suppose if one day my son decides to be a serial killer, I'll know why. So Sue me. I'm not going to shelter my child from anything. I trust the way I raise my child will over power something he sees on a video game. Be it violent or educational. Whatever.
How many of you were exposed to violent video games at a young age. If you were, does that mean you're a horrible person.... Or worse, the person who showed them to you was irresponsible?
i wasn't, but if i were, it'd have made the person showing them to me irresponsible.
look, if you want a debate about this, there's a forum for that. but you posted this in a help and advice forum, and the general consensus in the thread seems to be that you should be worried about violent content in regards to your young son. what it seems like is that you just wanted a bunch of people on the internets to agree with you and not your girlfriend so you could find ways to get her to stop nagging you.
unfortunately for you and master chief, she's right. if you really care about your son, you'll take every precaution you can instead of trying to find ways not to change your own lifestyle.
edit:
you keep mentioning this, and what frustrates me is that i would bet dollas to doughnuts you keep using this excuse until it becomes beneficial to go the opposite direction.
"he's two and a half, so he's got the mind of a 15 month old, he can't possibly understand"
"oh, i know he's only five, but he's so advanced i'm sure he understands things better than most kids his age"
edit2:
also, how old are you?
Thread solved in 9 words. The needlessly complex parenting debates in the rest of the posts are fun to read, but OP, if you consult a psych library or scour the internet every time 5 seconds and a bit of common sense will do, the next ten years of your life are going to be hell.
They didn't really exist when I was an infant.
I'm pretty sure none of us were.
He's 3, currently he can watch (and occassionaly join in) stuff with comic violence - Spiderman, Mario, Zelda, old 2d Virtual Console games, etc. However, stuff like Resident Evil is strictly after bedtime. I was actually really surprised when he told me that Ghost Squad scared him - no blood or anything, just the guys jumping out at the screen. I always play it by how he reacts if it's a game I'm unsure of so Ghost Squad is now an after hours game as well.
One thing to think about when he/she gets older isn't necessarily "will this game desensitize them to violence" like the media suggests but more "will this game and the images give my kid nightmares?" Frankly, I see that as the bigger issue with really young kids - images of war or monsters may come back to haunt them in the night and you'll feel like absolute crap knowing you caused it just because you wanted some more play time.