Family Life

The other day I went into the local FutureShop (a home electronics retailer) with the two older boys. It’s always fun to browse, even if you don’t intend to buy anything. The boys have acquired their Dad’s love of gadgets so they were quite eager. Wife had gone to buy supplies at Michaels, an arts-and-crafts store. That’s about the ultimate in boring as far as the family’s male population is concerned, so Dad and the boys went to look at something more interesting.

The boys like two sections of the store in particular: the TVs and the video games. First the TVs. What’s not to like? Exciting movies on screens taller than they are–quite literally larger than life. On a previous visit Daniel had seen a little of Ice Age 2, an animated movie, and it had captured his imagination. He was impatient to see what would be showing today.

The store usually has a promotional video playing, a series of five-minute clips from the latest releases on DVD. This time there were no animated features. Instead, there were scenes filled with violence, blood, anger, fear, and probably a lot of profanity if they’d had the sound turned up. I couldn’t believe it. Dozens of screens bigger than my couch showing a handful of movies, all extremely violent. At first my mind was elsewhere, but the boys were gazing in rapt attention. Within a few seconds they started to ask me questions about what they were seeing. It took me a few more seconds to actually look and realize what was on TV. Twenty seconds later we were striding toward the video game section, the boys craning their necks back to keep looking at the screens. If this had been Sodom and Gomorrah they’d be two-foot-high pillars of salt by now.

Tonight Daniel and I went to the McDonald’s play centre for a father-son date. There were some Nintendo screens set up, playing Pok

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