Tablet time lasts for 15 minutes every evening Bear Yoyo packets are rationed stories are read different albums played whatever the howls of protest from the back seat and TV time is also carefully managed. The point is that he doesn’t, because there are boundaries. He’d read non-fiction endlessly instead of stories have the same album playing every day for a month in the car during the school-run and watch Disney XD for so long that the programmes would start repeating. He’d eat Bear Yoyos until he was sick in order to collect more of the monster cards that come with them. My seven year-old would happily play Angry Birds Star Wars games for hours on the tablet if left unchecked. Sometimes, those worries spring from the ability of pretty much every child – as far as I can make out – to get addicted to (or at least obsessed by – I share Jenkins’ hesitance to bandy around “addiction” as a word here) pretty much anything that they enjoy doing. Parenting, judging by my experience with my five and seven year-old sons, is about a) worrying constantly, and b) trying to make informed decisions about setting boundaries in response to those worries. But my main response boils down to this: wouldn’t it be better for parents to understand Minecraft rather than worry about it?īecause once they understand the game and what their children are getting out of it, they’ll have a much better base of knowledge to make parenting decisions about and around it – from setting time limits to ensuring it’s complemented by other activities. He does make some points worth talking about in a much more balanced and less adversarial way. Jenkins clearly knows that he’ll have critics, referring to “Minecraft’s champions”, “the other side” and “the opposition” in the piece when suggesting how they might try to counter his arguments, setting this up as a battle.Īt this point, as someone who writes regularly about children and technology – Minecraft included – I’m probably expected to saddle up and charge into battle, laying waste to Jenkins’ arguments.
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