Suspended from college

Faline2
Sun, 23 May 2010 08:47:52 +0000

in all honesty, OP, the abdication to video gaming and “gamehead” identity in high school in your home has set up a situation where video gaming is very loaded up for your son…he has a lack of self regulation and does not get pleasure enough out of all the “other ways to spend your day and nights” because he has spent waaaaaaay too much of his youth gaming…
I would substitute “gaming” for “drinking” and view this as an addiction which is going to require a lot more intentional behavior on his part to kick. The question is how does a 19 year old male who is addicted to hours a day in Virtual World going to realign his psyche and find satisfactions and pleasures in other things in the real world.
My sons tell me that kids who are locked up in their “free time” on video games will fail in college…and this is a serious epidemic interfering with males in my view and destroying their mental and physical fitness. These are key years …and I think you might benefit from a couple of hours with a therapist to generate ideas on your parental stance at this juncture…you can’t make him cut this out of his life but you can make clear statements and help him reframe the Questions and Answers…plus you have the benefit of deciding what you can pay for and what you won’t pay for…there are some good ideas on this thread. But your son has to conclude that the Definition of his Problem is very tied to his preference for alternative reality accomplishments when Reality in fact is just around the corner…a terrible job market and no employment for people without accomplishments, skills and a strong track record.
in our household, I admit I was tempted and felt a bit like a heel when our basement was not Grand Central for middle school boys who loved to play with Xbox, Playstation etc…and we as parents were very ambivalent and not sure how to handle the males who were “bonding” in high school by hanging out on these games…but we felt in our guts that this was a destructive force for our sons. We felt the pain of our sons being on the outside of what other parents described as harmless use of weekends and evenings. So they were unpopular for a while. Ping Pong was not enough to tempt friends to come over without the requisite latest in video games…our son’s own like four Nintendo games that are obsolete…and were laughed at. But in the extra time they became accomplished musicians and physically fit and studied way more than two hours a day in high school…and when they got to college…they only met kids with the same level of discipline and in some cases far more discipline than my kids had developed by age 18. This is not to say that my kids also aren’t attracted to video gaming…they are! but they got caught up in other ways to feel pleasure…and your son may need help in finding pleasure in new ways in life before he can face the drudgery of studying…which simply has to have its own intrinsic rewards or no one would bother doing it at all.