Almighty Dad | A stay at home dad blog

I have never activated any parental controls on any of my game consoles for the simple reason that I trust my kids to know what content they shouldn’t watch.  They know, for instance, that they need to ask me before watching anything on Netflix.  And they do.  They also know that certain video games are not for them.  They know what I accept and what I don’t.  There is however one transgression for which I did not make myself clear.  I never told them they weren’t allowed to buy video games that were appropriate.  It never occurred to me that they would see a video game and just buy it (the trend these days is to buy digital content rather than an actual disk).  Naturally I wouldn’t be writing this had I not experienced this first hand.  It’s one of the perils of teaching your 5 year old to read.  He reads “Add more points?” and says “Hell, yeah I want to add more points.”  Then that’s what he does, and before you know it he’s bought every arcade game his little heart desires.  

Alan is a clever kid.  He gets what he wants through determination and guile.  I could have set all the parental controls that Xbox offers and still not been successful in preventing him from buying a mess of arcade games.  What I really needed to do had nothing to do with parental controls.  The only way, it seems, to prevent the kid from buying whatever he wants is to set an Xbox live pass code on my account.  If I do that then I’ll need to punch in a code whenever I want to log into Xbox live.  That’s annoying.   I’d rather not.  

The Alternative  

Well, okay, you got me.  There is one other way I can prevent him from buying games.  I could ask him not to buy them.  Gasp!  So that’s what I did.  All this talk about pass codes and parental controls, and I took care of it (so far) by explaining the concept of a credit card and money and how that makes me poor and how I don’t want to be poor.  He’s 5, and he’s sneaky, but he isn’t dishonest.  He bought the games because it was a loophole in my rules.  I told both boys to ask me if they weren’t sure about a movie they wanted to watch.  ESRB ratings mean almost nothing to me so my restrictions on games only went as far as to stipulate that they should use common sense.  I never said anything about not buying Lego Star Wars or Banjo Kazooie.  Parenting isn’t about putting shackles on your kids to prevent bad behavior.  It’s about teaching them so that the shackles become unnecessary.  That being said, if the kid decides to ignore our little discussion then the shackles will be put on.  We’ll wait and see how it works out.  

For Parents who are Concerned about Ratings  

My parenting method isn’t everybody’s parenting method.  Some folks think ESRB and MPAA ratings are accurate and a good guidepost to what their kids can watch.  For those folks I suggest reviewing the parental controls on your game console to fine tune the content you want your kids to have access to.  Each console has slightly different approaches to the family settings.  There is a good article in digitaltrends that compares parental control options on the Xbox, PS3 and Wii.  There is so much available content on all the systems that these days a game console is much more than just that.  They are full entertainment systems and not just gaming platforms.  It would be smart to review what’s available before blanket allowing everything.  It’s one more thing for parents to worry about I guess.

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