I have been seeing a lot of things lately about parents worrying about their children not playing outdoors. The parents are always complaining “Woe is me my child won’t leave the video game screen.” Or something along those lines. “Children need to go outside into nature and play” is another cry commonly heard. I just shake my head. Both sets of parents are correct and incorrect.

As adults we look back at sliding on icy hills with crazy carpets, running in the forest from angry bees, camping in the forest after hiking for hours. We remember the positives of these experiences. One of the things we forget, is the why. We didn’t walk out into the cold wrapped in 15 layers of clothes away from our warm TV on the first time by ourselves. We didn’t do it the first 20 times by ourselves. Our parents wrapped us up, took us out and slid down the hill with us. They took us into the forest to show us that it was safe, and fun to play there, they took us camping and frog hunting, and stone skipping. From my experience, a lot of kids are not getting that parent time anymore. This is a sad fact of the new world.

Parents nowadays take the easy way out of things, instead of finding ways to spend time with their kids, they let the TV and Computer raise them. A startling number of children come home to an empty house after school. Who is going to guide them? You even see it on TV advertisements now, Parents installing cameras in the house to watch their kids from work with. Watching is not guiding. Watching is not parenting. Parenting is not a spectator sport.

Parenting is a proactive sport. You want your kids to play outside, take their device away, and take them outside. Take them camping, or hiking, and if you take their device away, do not bring yours. If they have to be outside away from technology, and you are playing Tetris or the like on your phone while with them, it lets them know with no uncertain terms you would rather spend time with your phone than them, and of course they will feel the same way about you.

Take the children outside, on beautiful days, but don’t forget when we were young what did we do on not-so nice days? Final Fantasy, Street Fighter, Duck Hunt, Super Mario. Sit down with your kids and play with them. This is an excellent way for you to spend time, let them know you are not too busy for them, and it gives you time to feel out the games they like to play. If you sit down and play a gory fighting game with your 7 year old, you might realize it is not a good choice, and suggest a more age appropriate game to play together.

We do not have a game system in my house. But I will sit with my children while they are playing their games, and watch them, they love explaining the games to me, and if they need help we take turns playing. I sit through hours of “Edge” a day. My wife does not have the patience for that game as it is literally a glowing cube rolling in a maze of other blocky shapes. But JD and I enjoy it. Ok I hate playing the game, but I enjoy the intricacies of it, and the devious mind of the designer.

If you want your kids to unplug for periods of time, then you must also unplug yourself, and this is a very hard thing for adults to do as well. Especially with the diverseness of devices now. I have found myself, turning off my tablet, only to sit and read a book on my phone. Which is not unplugging myself. Neither is turning off your Computer to go and watch TV. Lead by example, then your kids will be more likely to listen to you.

The crazy thing is, a lot of the games kids enjoy on their computer are available as Table-top variations on the game. I was shocked to find a 3D Plants Vs Zombies game in China, or a table top Bejeweled game. And if it’s not, then with a little creativity, you can make one. I have contemplated buying a batch of building blocks to make an “Edge” level for my son to try on the table, many times, and I will do it after the move.

Parenting should not be thought of as a chore, you should love spending time with your kids, and showing them what you feel is fun, Who knows they might teach you a few things about fun that you forgot in the humdrum life of an adult.

Last night we were invited to a birthday party. A Surprise Suarez for our upstairs neighbour. Our neighbours are very nice people from the Philippines, and we thought it would be a nice thing to go do. The kids could have other kids to play with, Irish could get some Tagalog-time in with other Filipinos. Great time all around.

Now one thing I keep forgetting is that the Philippine culture is very social. Now if you are Filipino, this is great. However, I find myself in these parties that tend to isolate me. The only people that talk to me at these events are the host, who feels compelled to talk to everyone, and my wife. The other guests, group together away from me, and won’t even look at me. Now I am used to this and actually have been living life in this way for most of my life. But I want my wife to be able to go and socialize without worrying about me. I was perfectly happy with the Sunday funnies section of the newspaper, and the puzzles section of said newspaper.

I talked to an Irish man who worked at the restaurant for about an hour. He was a nice guy who had a lot of things to say about the government, and attempts by the government to quell the masses, but mostly it was political. So most of it I spend in wonder, as I have never been able to keep up with, let alone understand politics. I tried to keep up with him as best I could but all I remember from his conversation was that apparently fluoride is a neurotoxin (It is actually a developmental neurotoxin, which means it only affect children whose brain is still growing). And that the government has been forcing this on us, in the water, to pacify us for 50 years.

At that time JD was trying to integrate himself into the group of children, like Jane Goodall did with the Apes, trying desperately to be one of them, knowing that they were just different. It was heartbreaking. His sister has no problem integrating into any group of children with ease, JD tends to analyze them and try to understand them, first. Ann 8 year olds understanding of other children is always filled with questions, which he immediately returns to his senior research partner (Me) to ask questions about. “Why is Jacob climbing the fence?”,“Katie just stepped on an ant” “Samantha’s dancing funny” he would observe, as if trying to comprehend this culture of children. Then the Tablets happened (dun dun duuuuuunnnnnn)

In my opinion, parents that bring iPads (or any tablet computer) to social gatherings for their children, need to be smacked with a vengeance. We make a point never to do that, because (and our children know this) when you’re with other children, it is social time, and it’s rude to be stuck in front of a screen. Well some parents at the party decided to whip out their 2 iPads that they had brought, and of course, 12 kids tried frantically to crowd around to play Minecraft. So my son came and sat with me, bored and not really sure what to do. I gave him my phone to watch game walkthroughs (He has discovered an “edge” walkthrough that has helped his game a lot).

There were 3 cakes and a Mango float there. They had a small chocolate cake, a small vanilla cake with fruit on top and an ice-cream cake. Of course the moment they opened the box, the Ice-cream cake started to melt, and so we rushed to get the kids some of it before it was a puddle on the tray. They ate most of their pieces before they was drinkable. I didn’t have cake, but my wife and I had some mango float, which is like a frozen, ice-cream, mango, and graham crumb casserole. At the end of the night, we were given a section of the vanilla cake to bring home.

I had texted my brother to let him know that we had cake for him. But when we got home he wasn’t there yet. He arrived shortly after, looked at the cake, made a comment about the fruit, closed the box and got himself a bowl of ice-cream. I’m guessing that he doesn’t like cake with fruit on it. (It is not fruitcake, which is different). It was a mostly enjoyable party, but by the end of the night I was ready to take the kids home to bed.

I am very much like both my fathers, it seems, in a very interesting way. Keeping busy keeps me sane, or at least keeps me from being certifiable. Some people fight stress by watching TV, some do it by sleeping, some by arguing and fighting. Some deal with stress by drinking, but my stress relief is projects. I have at any point in time 5 projects at least on the go. Some never get finished, some get lost for various reasons, and some do get finished. Projects keep my mind focused, and helps me deal with life without hurting others emotionally or physically.

When I was young, I had a very bad temper. My whole family can attest to this. They have stories of me trying to strangle my baby brother when I was 2 years old. I would just explode at people for apparently no reason. This side of me used to terrify me. Now it takes a lot to bring this side of me out, and very few people in my adult life have seen it. I am thankful for that.

How do I keep stress from releasing this part of me? I keep busy and focus the energy on a project. When I was in Korea I had a Linux Red-hat server running with a radio station playing on it for my friends and I was programming a MySQL/ PHP based Role playing game. I would come home from work, and sit there for hours just staring at code. It relaxed me. Strangely enough, it seemed that the once or twice a month I would go out for a drink with a friend, THAT was when my family would call me. So I’m sure they felt that I was always out partying. I have lost the backups of this game that I was working on, which is alright, because when I look back upon it very little of it was mine. I had used copyright free graphics, code patches made by other programmers, and the whole system was built on a free to download package, so it served its purpose, and I feel no real loss of it.

When I lived in China with my family I built board games. I would find print and play games, and put them together. Games like “Smallville the board game”, “ Bewitched the card game”, “Hot death Uno” or “Dora the Explorer: Dora Rocks”. I would also find games from my past that were not available in China, like “Sorry” or “Rummoli” and I would hand draw, print, laminate, the pieces and cards. I was making them for the kids but the kids were too young to play them. I had to give those up when we returned to Canada, but I still have the digital files to start again with later.

Here in Canada I find myself collecting free digital comics. Some of them already compiled into the CBR (ComicBook Reader) format, some of them are webcomics that I have to design cover pages for each issue for. I locate, download, resize, page layout, cover design, made little adverts for the other comics I work on to put in the issue, and then combine into the CBR format. Any comics That are professionally made, and paid for I do not edit, that would be rude of me. But I do sometimes take older comics magazines that have 4 or 5 different stories & Heroes in them, and separate those into their own issues. I also try to translate foreign comics to English before I combine them. I started to translate Cybersix from the original Italian, but there was too much nudity and sex for my liking, so I removed it from my list. (The animation was awesome, but I don’t keep “Adult” comics.)

Over the years I have written quite a bit, lost some of the writings, and re-written. These are the ones that I regret losing. I am currently trying to write a book, using expanded and clarified versions of my old Psychosix stories. It is fun, as I have to introduce the characters before they can jump into the action, whereas before they didn’t need that. If anyone out there has any of my old stories backed up somewhere I would love to get copies of them back, I find that some of the ones I want to work with the most are missing. In fact anything I have written in the past would be greatly appreciated.

Working on these projects is both relaxing and fun. I always look forward to the finished project and sharing the projects with others, so feel free to ask what I’m working on at any time. But please do not ask the one question I hate when I’m in a project “Is it important?” because that is a mean question, and I will begrudgingly say “no… no its not”. Because it is not important to the survival of my family, it won’t pay the bills, but it does keep me from exploding. And non-explosive Chad is a good thing.