Helping Parents Succeed
Looking for ideas to have fun with your family? You have come to the right place. Here you'll discover excellent tips, checklists, and real life examples of how parents have fun with children.
By Abel Cheng
My daddy and mommy took me and my sister for a vacation in Kota Kinabalu (adults call it KK), Sabah, Malaysia. It was my first time on a plane.
To try to jot down this wonderful (sometimes scary) experience, I have written a chronicle of events of the trip.
By Abel Cheng
I can see the enormous improvement in my daughter, J, during our monthly hiking trip last weekend.
J is shy and introvert by nature. But in this trip, she opened up like I never see before.
Since this was a Christmas run, the hiking club invited a clown to entertain the kids. They danced, they played and they watched magic show.
The highlight was Santa Claus presenting gifts to all the kids there. In actual fact, this was pre-arranged. Parents had bought gifts before coming to the trip. The gifts were given to Santa and he distributed the gifts as though the presents were from him.
Each holiday season, a couple hard-to-find toys send parents hunting from store to store. And, each season, they're soon forgotten: Has your Elmo gotten any tickles lately?
But this year, it looks like the gift everybody is looking for is the same as last year: the Nintendo Wii.
A year after its launch, the small video game console sells out almost immediately when it reaches stores, even after Nintendo Co. has ramped up production several times.
"Right now, if you work at it, it's not too hard," said John Lawrence, of Fort Worth, Texas, who bought a Wii a few weeks ago for his 9-year-old grandson. It took him some online sleuthing to find one at a local GameStop.
"People have not gotten into the Christmas shopping mode. Once people get into that mindset, this is going to be an impossibility as it was last year," Lawrence said.
With the Wii, Nintendo set out make a console that would entice people who were not hardcore gamers, and it has succeeded. Janet Presti stood an hour in line at the Nintendo World Store in New York on Tuesday last week to get a Wii for her three children, but it wasn't just for them.
"I played it at my sister's house and I loved it," she said. Her household already has three game consoles: an Microsoft Xbox 360, a Sony PlayStation 2 and a Nintendo GameCube.
The Wii responds to the user moving the wand-like wireless controller, while other consoles are controlled by a confusing array of buttons and joysticks. It also comes with an array of casual, nonviolent games that appeal to adults.
Full report: Wii Is Most-Wanted Widget in Wintertime
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Jesse Lackman says his son spends a dozen hours a week waging medieval combat across the dreary dreamscapes of computer games. Just don't expect to find Lackman sitting beside him battling ogres and dragons.
"It's just such a waste of time," said Lackman, 47, a power plant operator from Center, N.D. "I tell him, "Do something that has some lasting value.'"
Lackman's avoidance of the digital diversions that captivate his 15-year-old son, Tyrus, is shared by many parents. More than four in 10, or 43 percent, of those whose young children play video or computer games never play along with them, according to an Associated Press-AOL Games poll released Monday.
While experts debate whether electronic gaming is bad news or a blessing for children and their families, many parents are voicing their preference by never — or seldom — joining their kids when it's time to slay cyber scoundrels.
Besides those who simply don't play the games with their children, another 30 percent say they spend less than an hour a week doing so. All told, about three in four parents of young gamers never or hardly ever touch the stuff.
Full report: Many Parents Avoid Video Games With Kids
By Abel Cheng
When my children paid a visit to their grandparents last weekend, we didn't do much as it was a short trip. The kids had only 2 days, 1 night to spend.
To best make use of the trip, I tried to get the kids to bond and hopefully form a closer relationship with my parents and siblings, whom they only meet once every few months.
Of course, playing with kids was one of the ways. But there’s one problem. It took a while for the kids to “warm-up” and accept my parents as playmates. Furthermore, my folks can't match the grandchildren’s enthusiasm.
Fortunately, I found a better idea: watching home made videos.