Dix Board Game Family

Reclaim your children from the screen
1. Auflage 2019
ISBN: 978-1-78583-445-5
Verlag: Crown House Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 208 Seiten

A roadmap to integrating board gaming into family life, filled with inspiring ways to engage even the trickiest of teenagers and manage game nights with flair. In The Board Game Family: Reclaim your children from the screen, Ellie Dix offers a roadmap to integrating board gaming into family life and presents inspiring ways to engage even the trickiest of teenagers and manage game nights with flair.  Many parents feel as if they are competing with screens for their children's attention. As their kids get older, they become more distant leading parents to worry about the quality of the already limited time they share. They yearn for tech-free time in which to reconnect, but don't know how to shift the balance. In The Board Game Family, teacher and educationalist Ellie Dix aims to help fellow parents by inviting them and their families into the unplugged and irresistible world of board games. The benefits of board gaming are far-reaching: playing games develops interpersonal skills, boosts confidence, improves memory formation and cognitive ability, and refines problem-solving and decision-making skills.  With these rewards in mind, Ellie shares a wealth of top tips and stealthy strategies that parents can draw upon to unleash the potential of those dusty game boxes at the back of the cupboard and become teachers of outstanding gamesmanship equipped to navigate the unfolding drama of competition, thwart the common causes of arguments and bind together a happier, more socially cohesive family unit. The book contains useful tips on the practicalities of getting started and offers valuable guidance on how parents can build a consensus with their children around establishing a set of house rules that ensure fair play. Ellie also eloquently explains the 'metagame' and the key elements of gamification (the application of game-playing principles to everyday life), and describes how a healthy culture of competition and good gamesmanship can strengthen relationships.  Furthermore, Ellie draws upon her vast knowledge to talk readers through the different types of board games available for example, time-bound or narrative-based games  so that they can identify those that they feel would best suit their family's tastes. The book complements these insights with a comprehensive appendix of 100+ game descriptions, where each entry includes a brief overview of the game and provides key information about game length, player count and its mechanics. Ideal for all parents of 8 to 18-year-olds who want to breathe new life into their family time.

A teacher and educationalist, and previously the co-owner and director of Pivotal Education, Ellie Dix has been obsessed with board games from an early age. Ellie firmly believes that board games have positively influenced her ability to solve problems, manage failure and experiment with multiple paths to success - and she now puts her teaching skills, understanding of behaviour and experience with gamification to use by helping parents to introduce board games to family life.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Dix, Ellie

Leseproben

Home truths to get to grips with.

The amount of information and advice that is thrown at us when we become parents is enormous. It can often seem like any decision we make is the wrong one. There is always someone ready to criticise or contradict, usually armed with a barrage of stories to back up their point of view. Doubt and guilt go hand in hand with parenting. As children grow, the challenges change. Dealing with teens and pre-teens can feel like we are navigating our way through a minefield, blind.

But, as a parent, you know your children better than anyone else and you are the person who is the most qualified to bring them up. Gather information, listen to advice, but make your own decisions about what will work with your family in your home. Be confident with your choices, even if those around you are making different ones.

To help you make parenting choices that will enable you to reclaim family time and play more together, here are my home truths. Grasp these and you’ll pull your family closer rather than drifting apart as your children mature.

HOME TRUTH 1: THE WAY YOU USED TO PARENT WON’T WORK NOW

Parenting needs to grow as our children do. Children have a way of going through rapid bursts of development, particularly when they hit puberty, and these changes can sneak up on parents and catch us unawares. It is really hard to let go of how we used to parent, especially if we’ve been successful in the past. Therefore, it is important to be as reflective and self-aware as possible.

When children are young, they rely on us for everything. The parent is their main guide and provider of information about the world and how to operate within it. Younger children tend to believe what their parents say, display less scepticism and are more easily influenced. Most younger children look up to their parents, and adulthood is often revered as a pretty exciting and magical existence.

As children get older, we give them more of an insight into the reality of adult life; we share our weaknesses, fears, worries, responsibilities and concerns. Of course, we must do this to teach them life skills and to help them become rounded, considerate people, but it removes some of the mystery around adulthood and the reverence often diminishes with it. It is hard to retain the control that many parents fight for when you’re dealing with young adults who have a wider social network that provides them with external influences on their behaviour and values. This fight between control and independence causes lots of problems in many families.

The desire for independence pushes children away from their parents. Although this is a natural part of growing up, it is often hard for parents to live with. They seem to want to talk, only not to us. As they start to build their own personal lives, they become more secretive and private. Of course, this independence is combined with the fact that they believe they’ve already learned everything you have to teach them, so they are less open to discussion and advice. Of course, some teenagers are more, well, teenagery than others. Most fluctuate, even in small ways, between wanting to be part of the family and wanting everyone to just leave them alone.

So, as parents of teens or pre-teens, what can we do to make the road a bit smoother and to keep the relationship strong, even in murky hormonal waters? People with adult children often talk about ‘coming out the other side’. After the distance and tumult of the teenage years, the bond between parent and child strengthens again. Focusing on the long-term relationship and seeing teenage behaviour for what it really is can be enormously helpful to a harried parent. Deal with the issues with as much detachment as possible and save your emotion for showing your hormonal children love. Look for opportunities to be proud. Look for ways to reinforce how important they are. They might think all sorts of things about you, but never let them think that you don’t love them.

HOME TRUTH 2: YOU’LL NEVER GET YOUR CHILDREN TO TELL YOU ABOUT THEIR DAY

Parenting older children is particularly challenging. Communication becomes less open and relationships more strained as they strive for more freedom without yet having any of the tools with which to achieve independence. You keep trying to communicate, but it often feels like you’re spiralling further away from each other. You long for the ease with which you communicated when they were younger.

This is how the separation spiral takes hold:

1. The child chooses to spend less time with their parents than they used to, so the parents are not as involved in their day and they don’t have as many natural opportunities to chat.
2. The parents become more disconnected with their child’s life, but they yearn for more connection and more time to talk. Whenever the parents get the opportunity, they will ‘show interest’ in their child’s life, usually by asking them lots of questions about their day, their friends, their teachers, etc.
3. The child finds this interaction annoying and possibly boring, getting frustrated because their parents ask them the same questions seemingly every time they meet. The child goes quiet and grunts.
4. The adult pads out the silence by talking about their own day, trying to find something to interest their offspring.
5. The child rolls their eyes, while simultaneously checking their smartphone, then makes a hasty exit to avoid having to answer annoying questions and listen to their parents’ inane babble about their pitiful lives.
6. Later at dinner, the child launches into a monologue about the intricacies of some video game they are playing, or performs an entire YouTube play-through video word-for-word with a full range of accents and sound effects.
7. The parents roll their eyes and tell the child to stop filling their head with useless information. They then comment on how well they’d be doing at school if only they put the same time and application into their studies as they do into their useless screen-based pastimes.
8. The child looks at the parents incredulously and with a pronounced sneer. They inwardly marvel at their parents’ ability to constantly put a downer on everything. They grumble about how nobody understands them anymore. The child vows to talk less and spend less time with their parents and more time talking to friends who do understand them.
9. Return to Step 1 and continue.

And so the cycle perpetuates and our children spiral ever further away. We ask our children about their lives because we want them to know that we care, but young adults don’t always want to say the sorts of things we want to hear. To maintain positive connections with our more stereotypical teenagers, we need to break the vicious cycle.

Rather than trying to get our children to tell us about their day, we need to create more moments in the day when we are doing things together, rather than just talking. When we are doing things, we can talk about the task at hand rather than attempting to find common conversational ground. Many families hold onto the idea of eating together as being the key to maintaining good bonds and open communication. But it is easy to fall into the separation spiral of asking the same questions and giving the same responses. For my family, eating together isn’t as important as playing together.

How much time do you spend with your children in an average week? I mean actually spend with them. If you are sitting in the same room but absorbed in your own activities, that doesn’t count. If you are sitting in the car next to each other, but they have their headphones on and the music turned up loud, that doesn’t count (not even if you are talking to them). Watching them doing their swimming practice from the relative comfort of the spectators’ balcony doesn’t count either. To count as time spent together, you must be choosing to do the same thing, at the same time, in the same space, together. Work it out. Now subtract any time that you spent together on screen-based activities (watching TV or a film, playing video games, etc.) – when your focus was on the screen, not on each other. Now you have your magic number of hours or minutes you’ve really spent with your children. We’re going to work on improving that number.

HOME TRUTH 3: YOU CAN’T CONTROL YOUR CHILD’S SCREEN TIME

The smartphone can be a real bone of contention between parents and children. The energy that goes into angling to get one in the first place, the gradual wearing down of parental resolve with horror stories of stranded phone-less children and bemoaning their status as social pariahs, followed by the all-consuming digital love affair that demands all their attention and time – these slim supercomputers can feel like a grenade launched into the centre of your family. Everyone has an opinion on the use of smartphones, their importance and their place in families and in the universe in general: many people share these opinions freely and sometimes loudly. Criticism and advice flies around whether you’ve asked for it or not and, as a parent, it is easy to feel that whatever decisions you make will be the wrong...