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Comment by RomanPushkin | Hacker News Reader

I tried to play with my 4 y.o. son to NES classic games. He loved Donkey Kong County, and some other arcades, but I found games affects his behavior in a bad way. He was always asking to play more, refusing to go and play outside, working at home with books, paper, and color pens and water paints. So we're not playing for 6 months or more. He loved plasticine, and makes some really fancy and realistic animals. He likes water painting on the paper, and likes when we read him books. We believe video games is not something we should hook up our kids for. Avoiding games, and limiting the amount of youtube videos to 30-60 mins helped a lot.

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Learning how to put the video game down is just as big a life lesson as many of the things the actual gameplay teaches you.

I think maybe 4 is a little young to ask a kid not to let their emotions drive them. But by the time they get to ages 6-10, video games can be a valuable tool for teaching time / life balance. Better to figure out at a young age that you have cravings to screw around when you should be doing something else, and you have to resist or bad things will happen.

Better they figure it out as a kid when "Bad things will happen" means "Parents will be mad." It's a lot tougher on them if they have to figure it out when they're a young adult, and "Bad things will happen" means "Flunking college" or "Losing a job."

Too many young adults can't deal with managing free time when they're first out on their own, and there are actual consequences to it at that point in their life.

Source: Was a kid once, was a young adult once, saw a couple other young adults wash out of college because nobody'd ever taught them how to stop playing video games when it starts to interfere with what they need to do.

I don’t have kids yet, but if I become a parent I also plan to encourage them to play more in the real world. I didn’t have access to a games console or computer at home until I was 10, so most of my youth was spent creating my own fun, usually outside.

What scares me even more is seeing parents of younger kids, giving them their phone and letting them watch episodes of Peppa Pig or similar, all the time. Guess it works to keep them quiet though...

Donkey Kong Country is SNES.

4yr-old is very young for video games.

Video games are a vice, not a hobby.

Giving your child video games is like giving him beer. (I learned this from bitter experience.)

Like most things, video games are a hobby for some and a vice for others. It has more to do with the person than the activity.

Also, a four year old is probably too young to be drinking beer but I don't think beer with a low ABV (0.5-2.5%) is particularly bad for older children as long as they don't drink enough to get drunk. I could be wrong about that though.

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