Raising a "Normal" Child - Learning to be Successful

My previous post introduced you to my family's horrifying discovery that we are not perfect. As parents, we made mistakes in the education and social upbringing of our son.Once strong willed, he was now fraught with anxiety issues and had difficulties engaging in social activities at school. The next phase of our lives involved acceptance, communication, and better expectations.

Anxiety can be frustrating

My son and I started having afternoon "conversations" where he would tell me about his day from going to school to coming home. At first he did not want to tell me about his "bad days" because he didn't want me to be mad. But, since I got called or emailed practically every day about his behavior, he learned he couldn't hide "bad days" from me. I also taught him, by being calm and nonjudgmental, that I accepted he would have "bad days," but this did not make him a "bad person." He had a hard time articulating his feelings, and many times his answers to questions were "I don't know." So we worked on finding the right words to describe various moments of his day.

Communication and the fantasy world of video games

Screenshot from Final Fantasy Online

Last September I wrote about a conversation I had with my son about violence, video games, and choices. A few days ago, I came across a story from CNET about South Korea's debate on a Game Addiction law. Intrigued, I looked more into it.

Since its leap into the wired world, Korea has struggled with online gaming and its effect on society. In 2002, before the term "internet addiction" became a global problem, Korea opened the first internet addiction treatment center. It was a bad year for the country in 2005 when ten people died from video-game related causes. By 2010, nearly 10% of Korea's teenagers were considered addicted to gaming. To combat the growing problem of teenagers spending too much time playing video games, an internet gaming curfew was proposed that would make 19 games unavailable to children between midnight and 8am. It became law in 2011 but is still being challenged in court.