Have you tried fishing or something like that? Maybe riding bikes? It sounds like you’ve let him grow dependent on video games. Maybe say oops the cable tore or something like that and keep the video games away from him. Or do something to the TV so that it doesn’t turn on(not permanent though). He will get tired of video games and start looking for something else
I got a canoe this month as an early Christmas present and he was terrified the entire time that an gator was going to get him after doing everything I could to share with him that it won’t happen that he is safe. My 3 year old just turned four was totally cool and loves it.
We don’t let him play video games a ton. We only let him for very small amounts a day and sometimes not at all. He has his chores, homework, we have him play outside with his siblings and so forth but when we try to get him to do something besides just run around with no rhyme or reason, he seems to do it but not excited about it. My wife and I were talking and trying to decide if I should just back way off and stop signing him up for things and maybe when his younger siblings start doing it he will want to start up, but I’m also worried that he will be an influence on the younger ones as well. So I’m just at a lost with how to keep it fun and exciting, keep pushing him forward to do things and know that practice makes perfect and is fun, without forcing him to do what “I” want him to do and not what he wants to do.
Well Maybe take him to a sports/outdoors store. Just walk around and see what he is interested in. I’m sure something will spark interest. And does be play with Legos? That’s something huge for a lot of kids like that(me when I was younger) at some point in there lives. Also, maybe you should back off for a little with the activities. Possibly let him choose a type of camp or try to slowly get him interested into boy scouts or something like that. Summer camps would probably be great, but only if he wants to(I wish I could have gone to a summer camp, my parents never let me. I’m 16 now so I guess bye bye to that dream. Also notice my age. Perhaps some might say my advice isnt valid because I’m not a parent but the way I see it I’m right between a boy and a man. I still know what it’s like to be a kid.
I know exactly what you’re talking about.
Today, in this day and age, it’s all about “instant gratification”. We’re all guilty of it to some extent, but some of us know how to deal with NOT getting it.
When I got into yoyo, I wanted to skew my results. I wanted to give my chances a bigger chance of success. How to do this? A clutch-type yoyo. My research consisted of Duncan and finding the Reflex and knowing of the Butterfly and the Imperial. Sparse, but was clearly enough. At the toy store, there was also Yomega, so my boy ended up with a Brain, which I was able to figure out was a clutch yoyo.
But, after gravity pull and sleeper, it was clear this was going to be work for me, and it has been. A LOT of hard work.
My kids, my in-laws and most other people I know have lost their patience and willingness to put in an effort for anything. My kids are getting over this. Piano lessons help, which I can equate to yoyo, from the standpoint of “the more you practice, the better you will get”, and while they seem to get this, I am tired of screaming at them to do their piano practices. We pick out battles…
I see this in schools too. One bad experience at the beginning and we’ve started a kid down a bad starting path. It’s like we have to coddle them until around 2nd grade, where we can finally let them experience a bit of slipping and falling backwards.
Odd how you mention roller skates. I use to skate. I spent a lot of time on my butt in a lot of pain. Yet, I did it. I also have a big nasty scar on my right knee from satisfying a “need for speed”, when I met with a small rock and well, you can figure how well that went because I’m saying I got a big nasty scar. Took a while to heal up, but I strapped the skates back on and kept at it. Inline skating? I’m not great, but I can sure have fun, and it took me months to get “acceptable” in my experience. My 7 year old(girl) gave up her skates after 1 run. My wife got the boy a skateboard, after 3 years of fighting it, I said “fine, you deal with it”. I can’t skateboard, don’t want to. Honestly, they scare me!(plus I can’t balance on those things… which is part of the issue!) I still use my inline skates every day: to drop off and pick up my kids from school while they bike back. I can usually beat them, but for how much longer, that remains uncertain. The clock is ticking.
“No” is not a word I like to use. It is used, but it’s not part of my general mindset. As you and I both work in closely tied industries that are entirely customer service drive, pleasing the customer is what is important and “no” isn’t a word clients like to hear and it’s not a term I like to use. But, my kids are so full of quit, and my wife is so full of quit and my in-laws are full of quit. They think “If I don’t try, I can’t fail”, but what they don’t understand is “if you don’t try, you’ve already failed”. If you try and fail, you can learn something from that, so even if the try was a failure, the knowledge gained may be more important that the attempt. But they can’t see that.
Similarly, all these “new kids on the block” who want to do what I do for a living(live sound), here they are with strong backs and legs and “energy” and most of the time, me, the 40-year old sound guy with a bad back, is smoking their tails and lasting longer than they do. After an hour of load in, I’m exhausted, but I’m not willing to give up until things are show ready. While they are dropping on the loading dock, I’m still pushing racks, running cable, whatever it takes to get the job done. I’m not too proud to take on any task, no matter how crappy or lowly. Honestly, at SacAnime, there’s a period where I have to detangle cables from the concert the night before and re-wrap them just to have to re-deploy them all for a concert in a few hours, and then the next day having to detangle and warp them again. It’s dirty, it’s time consuming, it’s thankless, and I just absolutely LOVE IT. Well, I enjoy mixing the show more, but I’m not afraid to get “back to basics”. Yeah, who can hang with the geezer? That’s what I thought! I guess I still got some life in me yet!
Again, I’m not anti-video game. I’m at a point where they just aren’t holding my attention much. To each their own.
I’m wondering what the kids’ real motivation behind the yoyo is. I think it may be they want a Dark Magic II as well. But, they are learning tricks at their own pace and not being pushed and it seems to be working. However, with no schedule for objectives, this works quite nicely for them. With piano lessons, they have a clear cut agenda with objectives and a hard timeline and they just want to fight it. I don’t get this type of behavior. Then again, I self-motivate and have drive. They did manage to learn how to ride their bikes so they could ride their bikes to school. That is good. Maybe they just don’t do well with short timelines? But, at $45/week for piano lessons, or $180 a month, they best get their act together. That’s really the only thing I am pushing on them as I feel it’s vital to their education.
I also enjoy archery and have a beautiful 35-pound wood recurve bow. But with small kids and little pug dogs and no practical place to shoot, archery isn’t something I can pursue with any practicality anymore. Target shooting for me only!
I am pursuing some sports a bit. I like soccer, but it wrecked my knees(tip: Dr. Scholl’s in the boots! DO IT!) but kicking the ball around is still fun. Baseball: catch is fun and some of the kids have gloves, as do I and there are softer balls that are safer for younger kids to miss with. I’m not into basketball myself, despite working for an NBA all-star and being to an All-Star event as a guest of the NBA. I detest American football on any level outside of “playing catch”. My wife nags me about “not taking the kids to the park” and I say “During the day, I’m taking care of business. I can’t say no to clients!”
My in-laws have/had tons of video game stuff. I’m not going to say they turned out wrong, but a lot of recent stuff has gone on and there’s a lot of bad stuff going on, but video games I am 100% positive are not playing a role here. It might be a symptom of other things I won’t go into.
I must say though that I’m pleased that my days aren’t being audibly polluted with electronic noises. I won’t prevent my kids from gaming, but I’m glad they’ve found something else they enjoy more. I’m finding that by letting them make their own choices, with a proper foundation, they are capable of making good decisions. But I haven’t seen them try the video game stuff since our return from Disneyland. They’ve been going though the YYE trick list. They are having issues with Rock The Baby due to adjusting the size of the cradle, but I bet in a day or two, they’ll have that down. A 5 year old doesn’t have big enough hands to have much room for error on that trick!
As parents, we have to lay that foundation for our kids. Clearly, good values are universal. As kids, you have that obligation to listen to what your parents are saying and learn good values and how to apply them. As parents, we have to provide a proper environment as well. I think this is where the break-downs are. We babysit the kids with TV and video games instead of raising them. Well, not everyone, but in larger numbers than before and in increasing numbers each year. I’m not perfect, I’ve done it myself, but at the same time, I’ve made a choice to say “yes, you can play video games” and “yes, you can watch TV”, rather than by default park them and let them tube themselves away. When I say OFF, it goes off(well, I let them save their games, so sick of seeing Resetti in Animal Crossing on the DS!) We don’t need a return to “good old fashioned values”, we need a reinforcement of “good old fashioned values”. The values never went away, just not enough people are enforcing them.
As I’m finding out through my wife, who is Vietnamese(born and raised there until her family emigrated here), good values are truly universal, crossing time and borders and ethics and race. Other than she was taught anti-American propaganda in Vietnamese schools(part of communist doctrine), our values line up fine. Odd things are stories. Many fairy tails are the same, as well as “urban myths” and other stories we tell our children. Granted, there may be variations based on cultural differences, but the core is the same. I bought a book of Hans Christian Anderson Fairy Tales to read to the kids, and I hadn’t read it before, being familiar with it through Disney’s Litlte Mermaid and other tellings of the that story with similar results. Let me just say that my wife knew the story and I was a bit let down and angered that Disney would tweak a classic, but hey, it’s Disney and the stuff is technically public domain. But, my point here is that my wife knew it properly, so clearly, these stories have universal appeals
10 minutes a day to practice… I wish I had that! I still carry a yoyo with me everywhere I go. One never knows!
Interesting development today:
The last kid(#4, no more after that, I’m getting an operation to prevent that!) had a choice to make today, at a mere 10 months old. The choice was her’s to make and wasn’t something pressed upon her.
Choice 1: Bottle full of fresh breast milk
Choice 2: The yoyo the almost 3 year old plays with.
She had to crawl over to the night stand where the two items were at the edge, and then pull herself up(she can stand, is almost walking at this age). Neither item was placed there by me.
Oddly enough, the yoyo was picked.
I think I better stick with my plans and keep buying bulk strings with every YYE order. Something tells me I’m gonna need all the strings I can get. I may have created a situation I can no longer control…
I do both off and on, more and more. I don’t think that, at least for me, there’s too much of a difference between them. They can both be fun, and a mostly useless skill, but I don’t think either of them would be any better for me. I guess yoyoing could be more of a “healthy” addiction, but for the most part both of them are good ways to spend spare time.
Er… no. Even if you don’t spend thousands on the most expensive consoles out there, there’s so many great older games. It’s so much easier to wait a few years and buy everything for cheaper. Also, after most games come out for something, you can pick the ones that you wanted the most out of all of them.
Never played video games, never owned a system of any kind.
Only yoyo, haha