Kids website - Fantage

Well, are you looking to wean them off of games completely, or partially, or just this particular site?

It doesn't seem dissimilar to the various game addictions I had as a child, really.

Cycloptichorn

After thinking about it, I think the warm weather will help - as it warms up they want to go outside.

In particular, though, this website. They want to be on it all the time. It seems addictive almost. And there isn't much "good" in it. In other words the games have no educational or other benefit - there are "fashion shows" and crap like that. You make friends and try to popular with the other members. Basically it seems to enforce the wrong sorts of values.

Fortunately between school, sports and studying it isn't like the are on for several hours. I just notice how much they want to be on it - and although the listen, when I tell them to get off, they really really don't want to.

I do hope this is one of those things they get bored with after a while. I try to avoid banning something simply because I don't like it as I figure this makes them want it all the more. Like when they loved Bratz dolls - now I managed to throw them all away as they don't even care for them any more.

In a corporate environment, I could configure things so that they get a painfully slow connection to that one website....

Ha!

We went through something similar with the iPod touch, in general (no specific site). Sozlet doesn't have a DS or a Wii or anything, and is over Webkinz and most other web-based stuff (she does really like Physics Games, but not to that addictive MUST DO level). But when we got the iPod (one that the whole family shares), she went through a series of addictions -- Angry Birds, Civ Rev, Doodle Jump, etc.

So I started limiting how much she could use it because I didn't like how she'd come home from school and make a beeline for it. Also she would get so completely engrossed that it caused problems. Like, usually she has a snack when she comes home from school -- when she'd make a beeline she both wouldn't have a snack and wouldn't pay attention to her hunger level until it could no longer be ignored, and then she'd emerge from the iPod after an hour or whatever not only hungry but ABSOLUTELY STARVING TO DEATH, with attendant drama.

Anyway, the limiting worked, and now she still uses it occasionally but the whole thing is much less intense.

It doesn't SEEM addictive - it IS addictive. I don't mean that as some sort of scary statement, just a reflection as to my own experiences with such things.

Video games in large part - at least for me - represented a level of intellectual challenge that was missing from pretty much every other area of my life. School was interesting but ultimately boring. When I got a really good new game, I would want to play it - to the exclusion of almost everything else in my life.

As an adult, for a while after college, I played an online role playing game called Final Fantasy 11. It takes serious work and dedication to succeed within this game and you make friends with people from all over the world. I don't exaggerate a bit when I say this: it was, and still is, more fun than any other thing I have ever done in my life. Period. I don't play it any longer, because I start to lose all desire to do anything else. Quickly.

Cycloptichorn

That would be really awesome. Make it so painful they don't want to go on.

Yes it is like that. They really want to go on it.

Fortunately most weeks they are way too busy to be on it in what I would consider too long. And with two, they need to take turns also limited the amount of time. I simply don't like them to be so intense about a website that seems to have no merit whatsoever.