Teen runs away after his parents take away his 360

[Makya]

Sorry but I am going to be a cold bitch. SURPRISE! When it all comes down to it, it was the fault of the parents. They should not have let their son purchase a violent video game. Even if it was his own christmas money. Fuck that. One of my boys tried pulling that shit, I would personally take it back to the store.

[Jezza]

Originally Posted by Makya

Sorry but I am going to be a cold bitch. SURPRISE! When it all comes down to it, it was the fault of the parents. They should not have let their son purchase a violent video game. Even if it was his own christmas money. Fuck that. One of my boys tried pulling that shit, I would personally take it back to the store.

Sorry, but violent video games actually only make people who are fucked up in the first place fucked up.

Hell if anything when violent video games started the crime rate has went down.





So how "bad" are they now?

[Makya]

Doesn't matter Jezza. As a parent, I can honestly say that I am not stupid enough to buy violent video games for my boys. There is an age rating on it for a reason. It is because the adolescent mind is not capable of handling fiction from reality until a certain age. Therefor it makes it the fault of the parents for buying their 15 year old a game meant for adults.

[WillRiker]

As a parent I've raised my son to be able to differentiate between reality and fiction. We exercised some caution up until he was about 14 but were sensible enough to know that he was gonna be learning the things we were "shielding" him from in the school yard anyway. So he's been allowed to play "18" rated games for a while now as he knows it's a video game and not reality...he knows this because, as a parent, I've had a dialogue with him for years now and made it clear what is real and what isn't.

I've been engaged as a parent in his upbringing and development. I haven't left it to the TV to raise him or the schools either, and therefore I am more than confident that he is able to distinguish between fact and fiction.

He is 15 at Christmas and is now discovering my entire movie collection and is working his way through movies, a lot of which are 18, but he always checks with me first to see if they're "OK" for him to watch and if they're far too violent or have too much sex in them I tell him he'll have to leave it a year or so until he's a bit older. That's called parental responsibility. I know how intelligent he is and I know what he can "cope with" and what he can't.

If the parents in this case had been even as half as engaged with their kid this would never have happened.

At the end of the day it comes down to each parent I suppose.

Makya, as a parent, can make the decision that her kids won't be able to distinguish between cartoon video game violence and actually going out and cutting someone in half with a katana...I as a parent know that Jeremy isn't going to pick up a katana and slice the nieghbours up as soon as he turns off the playstation.

[mommysalomi]

I agree Will. I started with my kids very early on what is real and what is not. They love horror movies and know they are fake. My son has been playing these kind of games since he was 13 but we know he knows it is a game and that is all. Same with movies he can watch them but not repeat them. As you siad they are gonna learn it anyways.

[Makya]

Will, I totally agree with you. I really do. But not all parents are as smart as you and I (and probably everyone else who reads these forums) and don't talk to their children with important matters nor keep a leg in on what they are interested in and finding out everything they possibly can about it. You have to know that your child is capable of realizing fantasy from reality and know the total difference between right and wrong like Jezza.

I suppose what I was trying to point out, and lacked to explain properly, is that when shit like this tends to happen, the parents are quick to point a finger at a violent video game, or music, or whatever the hell they can put the blame on first instead of taking responsibility themselves. If that boy was showing a sign of dependence on video games that was that strong, they should have recognized the problem a hell of a lot sooner and taken a different route that would have helped their son.