So like seemingly every other writer in Toronto, I’ve been reading Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, and last night around 1:30 a.m., I finished it. Was it the masterpiece it was hailed as in this review by the New York Times? Naw, I don’t think so. Its excellence follows an upward curve; it starts rough, then gets steadily more captivating until the concluding pages are approaching brilliant. But there was too much backstory for me—too much going back in the narrative and recounting past events, “He had done this,” “She had done that,” rather than recounting events as they happened—”He did this, she did that.” Recounting backstory is always less captivating than chronicling story, if only because, by recounting the past from the point of view of a future narrator, we have a clue to the end; that is, that the narrator remains alive to tell us the events we’re following. Nevertheless I thought it a fascinating depiction of a North American family, one with some problems I found particularly disturbing—and which may disturb other Bunchland readers, as well. Read more...
The New York Times magazine ran a really thought-provoking essay in a special issue on empowering women yesterday. By Lisa Belkin, author of the paper’s Motherlode parenting blog, the piece (linked here) argues that women’s careers won’t achieve equality with men until men assume equal responsibility in the family, for parenting roles.
“That women are not yet equal in the workplace is largely a result of the fact that they are not equal at home,” writes Belkin in a related blog post. “And that last gap will not close until our policies and expectations change for men.”
So you know the conflict, right? My parents introduced my kid to Nintendo Wii. He’s become obsessed with Mario Kart. I talked to experts about introducing kids to virtual entertainments; one that suggested yes, go for it, and then one that was just plain scary. Before I came to any decision, I was still mulling things over. I tend to do that, I mull things over for ages, I’m in a perpetual state of mull.
Facebook helped me procrastinate from making a decision. I posted on my wall one of the earlier Bunch Family posts under the headline, Should I buy my 4-year-old a Wii? Old friends weighed in, and the result was an experiment in communal parenting; the social network as advice maven. Only one friend voted against. The rest, most of whom had kids who were older than mine, suggested I go for it. “We’ve had a lot of family fun with ours,” said Amy Logan Holmes, the impresario of Open Book Toronto. “Especially the dorky bowling game.”
After the interview with videogame critic Josh Ostroff, I still wasn’t certain whether I should buy my 4-year-old son a Nintendo Wii. So I called up Robin Benger, an old friend of mine. Robin is a Toronto documentary filmmaker and father to three children, including his oldest, 25-year-old Griffin Benger, who first started playing videogames as an 11-year-old boy and quickly found his way to the military-based first-person shooter, Counter-Strike.
Dad Robin tried to limit the gameplay to an hour per day, once Griffin was done his homework. But as the years passed, the game started coming between parent and child. Griffin played the game for hours at a time, then, seemingly, days at a time. If he was banned from the computer, he waited until his parents were asleep, then crept downstairs to play all night. When Robin disconnected and hid the computer, Griffin would sneak out in the middle of the night and go to web cafes to play. Sometimes he’d be out for days at a time.
Joshua Ostroff is the music editor for AOL’s Spinner.ca and the videogame critic for Exclaim magazine. He’s also an old friend and the father of 13-month-old Emile. As the owner of all three major consoles and a big advocate for interactive culture, Joshua was certain to challenge my wariness about games and kids, as I tried to decide whether it was time to get my family a Wii.
SHULGAN: Joshua, have you thought about whether you’re going to let Emile play videogames, when he’s a little older?
OSTROFF: He’s already playing videogames. Or at least he plays with the iPad.
Any in particular?
Sure, he likes anything that lets him affect the look of the screen or creates a musical response. There’s a virtual piano app that fascinates him to no end, and he likes making fireworks explode with his fingers and scattering the fish in a virtual koi pond. Read more...
My parents have the Nintendo Wii. My house does not. Nor do I have an Xbox 360 or a PS3. This slide into a videogame-less existence did not happen intentionally. Up until the last console generation I was a fairly faithful gamer; not diehard, but I made it a point to buy the latest PS-whatever, and every so often I would become so immersed in a game that it would take over my life. If you’ve played videogames, you know the drill. And then, when it came time to upgrade to a Wii/Xbox360/PS3, I basically forgot. We had kids. Life was crazy.
Wow! Raw-ish video of last week’s debate between Bunch Family‘s Rebecca Brown and Superdad writer Christopher Shulgan, in a no-holds-barred battle to the finish over the topic, “Is Fatherhood Lame?” Try not to pay attention to the shakiness of the video and just listen to the discussion of the way pop culture portrays parenting, particularly fatherhood. And tomorrow, the start of an exploration of kids and videogames, which attempts to establish some conclusions on when it’s appropriate to introduce the awesomeness of today’s most captivating entertainments.
