Feral Fridays: The Insidious Threat of VGDD!!!!

This post is written by our special guest, Wanda Vesana, the high priestess of the Feral Homeschooling movement that is sweeping the nation.  Wanda is mom to two ideal children, son Silas and daughter Verna.  You can read our interview with her here.  Wanda shares her wisdom with us on this blog on occasional "Feral Fridays".

Recently, it has come to my attention that I've been wrong, wrong, wrong, and it's time to mend the error of my ways!!!  It was always obvious to me that my children are completely perfect.  And yet...maybe not!  There is frankly something lacking in their social skills, their problem solving ability, their creativity, their hand-eye coordination, etc. etc.  My husband Tyrone and I have consulted countless experts and came to the inevitable conclusion.  We were too busy, too wrapped up in our daily routines, to notice.  We thought we were doing everything right, giving them fresh air, exploring nature with them, fostering their experimentation with the arts, exposing them to poetry on community field trips, learning history by mummifying things, and so much more.  We valued direct experience over any other learning method. Our children had found mentors and were learning career skills at their sides, Silas spending his days with Gary of Dancing Bear Taxidermy and Verna preparing for her first long run trip with teamster Large Marge.  All seemed well.  But it was not!!!  Have you guessed it??? They were not playing video games!

This was not for any particular reason.  We didn't actually forbid them.  Tyrone and I don't happen to play them, so we didn't already have them in our home when the stork brought our little angels from heaven.  I was warned repeatedly when I became pregnant for the first time that I would need to start gaming, but I was heedless!  Silas and Verna have always seemed to keep themselves busy without them, baking cookies, playing board games, experimenting with dynamite, you name it.  Thank goodness my concerned friend Myrtle loaned me her well worn copy of Last Kid off the Couch: Saving Our Children From Video Game Deficit Disorder by Dr. Randall Q. Birte, PhD.  Here are some key points he shares:

• Surveys of all of America's top employers say that hand-eye coordination is the number one skill they look for when making hiring and promotional decisions.  If you had lost your hands or your eyes, you'd have a hard time finding a job, wouldn't you?  That just proves how vital hand-eye coordination really is.  Candidates without it are left in the dust.
• Kids who play video games are six times more creative than kids who don't, and twelve times more creative than kids who participate in the arts.  
• Kids who play video games also solve problems better, and are far more likely to seek positions of leadership within their communities.  None of our world's most pressing problems are likely to be solved in the future by people who don't play video games.
• All of history's most infamous villains- Attila the Hun, Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot, etc. all have one other thing in common: none of them played video games.  But Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. did.
• Real life violent crimes are almost never perpetuated by people who are in the act of playing even the most violent video games.
• America's educational system has been credited with producing students that outperform their counterparts in other countries,  by pretty much any standard.  Yet this correlates very closely with the rise in popularity of video games.  
• Countless scientific studies have shown that friendships and family relationships are stronger and more meaningful when individuals do not share eye contact.  Video games allow people to play together, either in each other's proximity or virtually, minimizing eye contact.  
•  Sunlight gives you cancer, sunscreen can have nasty additives in it that likewise cause cancer, nature involves potential exposure to carnivorous predators and poison ivy, devastating forest fires always happen in the presence of trees, and video games are generally easier to play indoors.  
• Exercise likewise exposes people to the risk of injury.  All too often these injuries are even fatal!!! The number of fatalities from video game playing may be well publicized, but this number is statistically much smaller than injuries from sports and exercise.
• Real life does not always give you any kind of meaningful correlation between effort and success, and often nasty stuff happens that is totally unpredictable and cannot be corrected just by pressing "restart". Studies show that people experience far more positive emotions in any given span of time while playing video games than they do in normal daily activities.  Real life sucks and video games are a much better option. 
•  Statistics show that young people will play an average of 10,000 hours of video games by age 21, equal to all the time they spend in middle school and high school.  That's also enough hours to become a virtuoso at virtually anything.  So why on earth waste 10,000 hours on something else?!?

Tyrone and I  have henceforth decided that even though our children have so far expressed no real interest in video games, it is time to get our heads out of the sand. Our children have serious "real world" addictions that must be stopped. We cannot allow Video Game Deficit Disorder to run rampant in our home. Video games will now be mandatory!   I have heard that oft-repeated phrase, "all things in moderation", applied to video games, but I just don't see the point. With something so overwhelmingly crucial to our children's lives, we're going at it with all guns blazing!

Until next Feral Friday... Stay feral, everyone!