“Don’t sit so close to the TV! You gonna lose your eyesight!” — My grandma, ~1987.
Full disclosure, I am a Game Designer. I work for a major company in the games industry. My specialty is designing free-to-play games for mobile devices. I am also a father of a 9-year-old child with a vivid imagination and a healthy dose of curiosity. I do my best to balance my career with my parental duties. This is not always easy. I do not succeed 100%, but I try. My position between the two worlds gives me a somewhat unique perspective. This is something, I think is worth sharing. I hope you might find it useful.
Being a parent is easy. It’s being a good parent that is hard. To be sure, it was never easy. It wasn’t easy in the middle ages when famine and pestilence ravaged the countryside. It wasn’t easy when our parents were raising us, trying at the same time to balance their own careers and navigate the ever-changing chaotic world around us.
Technology can help. My father would have loved the possibility to reach me at any moment via cellphone when I was a kid. Then again he had to wrestle only with the challenges of only two, tightly managed TV channels.
As our technology advances, it seems that every new decade brings in new challenges to parents. My grandma was worried sick that my father will lose his eyesight reading the books in his bed in the feeble light of his bedside lamp. My parents were afraid that I am sitting too close to a cathode ray tube of our TV set. I see many of my fellow parents struggle to get a handle on the relationship that their kids have with their smartphones and tablets.
On one hand, these things come in very handy. Anything that can occupy your kids’ attention for any amount of time can be a godsend if you actually need to do some work around them and can’t devote 100% of your attention to them. On the other hand, there is a myriad of questions you might be asking yourself. Is my child spending too much time with the phone? Is he getting enough physical activity? What is this stupid stuff he is playing or watching? The anecdotal stories of kids spending hundreds of dollars/euros on purchases in mobile games only add to parental anxiety.
I hope that the following list will help you deal with at least some of these matters.
