How Video Games Made Me A Better Mum
I am not a chirpy mother. I honestly don’t think I was wired to be one. But nevertheless, sometime last year I was handed a carefully wrapped up bit of pink squish that wriggled – shortly before I started vomiting everywhere due to a bad reaction to the drugs I had been given.
Here’s a quick recap for those who haven’t experienced the joy of procreation: being a mum is kind of like an RPG where every choice your character makes is met with condescension and judgement. For real – imagine like, in Skyrim, every time you did ANYTHING you had half the village out after you. I’m not talking about doing stuff like killing chickens – like, if you craft a leather shield you’ll have villagers wailing and moaning at how you’re basically worse than the dragons because you skimped on protection and didn’t get the dragon bone shield. And then you get home after a hard day being the Dragonborn and you’ve got puke and shit to clean up for the next two hours. Let’s just say you level up in your “cleaning like the adult you always promised you’d end up as” skill tree pretty damn quickly. But it’s somehow the best game you’ve ever played and consistently gets top scores on IGN. Yeah, I don’t know how either. It just does.
I guess the good news is that I’ve actually been training for parenthood for years without even realising it. Here are some skills I’ve picked up after my 20+ years of gaming:
The Multitasking
This one is a bit of an obvious one, and pretty obvious by the accompanying image to this article. There’s just something about learning to participate in a chat room while gaming at the same time that just sets you up really well for parenthood. In my case, it actually assisted in helping me relax enough to feed my child without crying about the pain of it. Full Story On PlayWrite.
