Janice Turner is a hard working mom. She can’t constantly be watching everything her children do which includes watching TV, using the computer and listening to the iPod. One thing she can control apparently is how often her kids play video games, which is never since she refuses to buy her kids any gaming consoles. As a parent, this is of course her choice and more power to her for trying to get her kids to spend some quality time playing outside with other kids and the like. My parents did the same to me with cartoons. Saturday at noon the TV went off and my brother and I went outside. Getting your kids to do anything besides intaking copious amounts of media has been a problem for parents since the invention of the radio. But, as “media” grows larger there are more distractions that make it harder for parents to get their kids away from it.

This is the subject matter that Turner tackles in her recent rant/article on The Times website. Although her article is titled “Xbox is crack for Kids” she mostly complains about general media and technology and how to (or not to) regulate “screen time” for her kids and how this is a seemingly impossible task. She saves her most venomous words for video games which she attacks with vehemence in the last paragraph:

Once, such kids would be the playground outcasts, but no longer. Mine are. Because, unlike the TV-hating parents, I refuse to buy them portable gaming consoles, Xboxes, GameCubes, PS2s. These are Satan’s Sudoku, crack cocaine of the brain. Even the crappiest cartoon or lamest soap teaches a child about character, plot, drama, humour, life. Playing videogames, children are mentally imprisoned, wired into their evil creators’ brains. And they play them – beepety-beep – on journeys, over family meals, any minute in which they find themselves unamused.

And their parents never seem to say, hey, this is the bit where you pick up a book. Or game over, kids: get an inner life.