Today’s kids seem obsessed with technology and while I love gadgets and technology with all the benefits it can bring. I feel like we have lost something when our kids only play computer games.
My 3 kids each have a ds lite and I often see them all sitting by themselves, playing on their individual game consoles. You see, I’m as much to blame as everyone else. As a child, and yes, that makes me sound old, I remember very little of my childhood that wasn’t related to gaming, sitting around Christmas for example with my family playing cards, trivia, monopoly, etc. I believe that play is the way children learn, develop life skills by participating and interacting with others.
Turn taking games for kids are not only fun, they are also educational on many levels, including social and economic.
Children learn to wait to take a turn, win and lose, along with cooperation and economics (with monopoly in mind and managing money), all the while having fun. Games come in and out of fashion, and new games appear, while the classics are renewed year after year with new themes and are always popular.
Kids games are made to stretch the mind of the child and even the parents at times, without frustrating the child and taking him out of the game, making learning enjoyable. Most kids games are also quite fun to play with mom or dad, and family games are designed to entertain both kids and adults.
If you’re looking for something to bring a family together, then you can’t go wrong with any type of board game. While playing, a family can often get lost inside the game for hours on end.
If you don’t know what to get a child as a gift, then you might do worse than buy a board game. I think it’s one of the best gifts you can give, because it brings friends and family together and can provide more hours of fun than any book, DVD or CD you can find. A board game is a team-building exercise (or a team-breaking exercise if you’ve been sitting around our table on too many heated nights) that you can’t ignore. It is a way to exercise the mind and build social skills.
If you sit down and examine the rules and design of most games, they all have one thing in common, you will see that they are reflected in everyday life. Whether we are playing fast with a card game that teaches us to take turns, for example, exercising the mind to keep it sharp and helping with learning difficulties, matching numbers and pictures, or trivia activities with team building, knowledge learning and strategy development.
Quality educational games are very attractive to most people; children rarely know that they are learning valuable skills, which makes this a fantastic way to learn, as information and skills learned this way, in my opinion, stick in the mind much better than when they are forced rules and education.
Today, children’s games are well thought out, fun, and compete well with the appeal of the solitaire video game, given the chance.
