Attention Deficit Parents

I've been doing some thinking about this - and my thoughts were confirmed yesterday as I was letting Nigel play flash games on my PC.

There's all this talk of our new generation kids that can't sit still, get bored easily, always looking for the next thing to do. But I think a big reason for that is us, their grown-up parents. As I helped Nigel to find a fun game, I constantly kept getting him to change to a new game after just 30 seconds - he wasn't complaining about the games, but I felt he was getting tired and wanted a new one. After a while, I realised that it was me who was getting bored on his behalf, and also partly of watching him play. In a way, we, adults of the attention deficit era, have imposed our inability to focus and concentrate on anything onto our youth. We think they are restless, we think they want something new, when actually we are the ones who can't sit down patiently and watch them.

After I realised this, I went away and let him play Sonic the Hedgehog and he was happily enjoying himself. Until Celest chased him down to eat dinner :)