Two years have passed since I banned the Nintendo and Playstation. And I never wrote about it. Here's a quick recap: Shane was a video game junkie. It all started when he was almost five years old and
Ian was sick and needed rest. We let Shane play just to keep him from jumping on Ian. His playing
quickly turned crazy. He would get up at 6:00 in the morning and get his schoolwork done by
7:00 so he could play (I had to teach him what 6:00 looked like on the
clock so he wouldn't get up earlier than that). He learned the days of
the week so he could count how many days until he could play again. Then we
had to move and kept the kids from messing up the house while we tried to sell it. And after we moved here, we sometimes needed to keep them out of the way and quiet. He dreamed about video games, he colored video games, everything was video games, video games, video games. Shane was able to remember all sorts of strange things about the video
games...like in which order he found certain things... like once he
said, "That balloon up there was the 19th balloon that I found." He
also said, "I remember the day Daniel was born. I was the day I got
the boomerang in Zelda."
Two years ago it got so bad that I decided to let him play video games as long as he wanted just to see if he could self regulate. Nope. Three days of playing in isolation. We didn't tell him to eat or sleep, we left those decisions completely up to him. We wanted to see if he would get bored, turn off the machine, and come out to see what everyone else was doing. And he never did. The first night we all went to bed and he kept playing until he was so tired he couldn't play anymore. Then he came out and wondered where we all were. I felt terrible about the whole thing, but I felt like I needed to finish my experiment. The other kids, especially Ian, were super worried about Shane. Shane was no longer able to hold a conversation or walk without tripping. It was really weird. So we took the systems down and put them in a box.
In honor of Shane's 9th birthday, I told them if they cleaned the house we would set them up again...
...and my zombies are back!
