Video Games and Values
It had been a good morning so far. The oldest had just woken up and we were hanging out, just doing the morning routine. That little dude is a total daddy’s boy right now, which I’m absolutely okay with, so he was following me around the way a dog follows someone carrying beef jerky. I was getting some things ready for the day and he was beaming, just glad to be hanging out with me. We’d fallen into a similar routine with all my time off for the holidays and these morning moments had become the norm.
When Everything Changed
That all changed when I did something kind of dumb. Once I’d gotten all the lights turned on, coffee rolling, and the dog situated, I grabbed my Xbox controller. As soon as my hand touched the controller, the little guy’s demeanor changed from top to bottom instantly. His shoulders slumped, head lowered, smile turned into a subtle pout and his eyes went into full puppy dog mode.
With that one little action and in that one little moment without so much as a word, I told him what I’d rather be doing than hanging out with him.
The look on his face kind of broke my heart. Though he’s still getting the hang of this whole speaking thing, he spoke volumes in that moment. I’d fallen into the routine of playing a game for a little bit in the mornings during my time off, and had probably gotten a little too hooked on it. And he started to notice.
He’s not even two years old, and already he’s picking up on those kinds of cues. He’s already trying to figure out where he lands on some sort of value scale.
A sense of value is a deep part of what makes us human. On some level, we all just want to feel valuable to the people we hold most dear. This is true of 20-month olds, 20-year olds, and 120-year olds (probably—I’m not really sure who to ask about that, but I like the literary parallel).
Valuable Time
I think it can be easy for dads to overlook the first few years of life for kiddos. In fact, I know it is because I hear other dads say things to that effect all the time. I get it. It can be hard to connect with a baby, especially at the level a mom can. It’s an odd phenomenon but it’s a real thing.
Maybe it’s a combination of the way moms are just inherently better at being nurturing, the way they seem to just always have a good answer for things (literally what do I do about that smell?), and the fact that moms have nine more months of relationship equity than dads do. But moms often connect way better with babies than dads. So we resort to the task-oriented side of parenting. We do things. We have our mental (and sometimes literal) checklist of how to keep a tiny human alive, and we stick to that like a field manual until they’re old enough to be fun. And by fun, I mean have lightsaber fights and play football.
Not to say I don’t love my babies and have a ton of fun with them, because I totally do. I love teaching them things and just hanging out and watching them figure out this brave new world around them. But I’m ready to go to ball games, or play frisbee, or do literally anything that doesn’t play annoying music with flashing lights everywhere. So I sometimes forget these times are important, too.
Even at 21 months, my son is trying to figure out where he lands in my list of priorities. He doesn’t know he’s doing that, of course, but something deep inside him wants to answer that unspoken question.
My daily challenge is going to be in what my answer is. Now, excuse me while I hide my Xbox controller from myself.
