What games are your kids playing? Which games are ok for them to play?

           My kids have things, and have access to things that I never dreamed of.  They have Wii, Playstation, Xbox, not to mention Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter (whatever that is).  It is hard as a parent to keep up with what our kids are doing, watching, and playing every second of the day.

        Raising kids today is hard. Maybe it has always been hard, and now it’s just a different kind of hard.  But no matter how you look at it, raising kids in the world today is incredibly challenging.  A parent has to know not only where your kids are and what they are doing, but understand what they are doing as well.

         If you don’t actually play the games that your kids are playing you don’t have any idea what kind of violence, gore, profanity, or even worse stuff might be involved.  Console games currently come with an ESRB Rating, if they have been rated.  These ratings don’t always tell very much about what is actually in the game.  They are a good place to start though. Check out the ESRB website for more information on their rating system.

www.esrb.org

       As parents we often need someone to tell us exactly what is in these games and let us decide whether to let our children play them.  Check out this next site if you want a more in depth review of the games.

www.whattheyplay.com 

      Whattheyplay.com is a great website, it has great reviews, tells you what games are rated and why. It also shows you which games are hot in the different rating categories.  This is definitely a great free resource for keeping track of what your kids are playing.

      We worry immensely about the effect of all of this technology on our children as they grow into young adults.  www.mediafamily.org does a good job of breaking down the statistics, and addressing the effect that our media saturated culture has on our kids.

      If you are looking for a Christian perspective on family appropriate video games you might want to check out this website.

www.plaingames.com

Plaingames.com has an alternative rating system to the ESRB that is based on Christian values.

         We can’t watch everything our kids do. We don’t always see what we should, and we don’t always do everything right.  All we can do is the best we can do, but these great free websites do give you a heads.  Check them out and see what games your kids are really playing.