I am a terrible parent and Nintendo is to blame

Nintendo really ruins everything. Let me explain.

Two days ago, my 6 year old son learned a new word, and that word was "resilience".

We were in the car. Fifteen minutes earlier, his school friend was visiting. There was a fight over a toy. I will not bore you with the details, but the end result was disproportionate: the child visiting an inch of my own son's face, screaming over his lungs, aged 6, asking my child to give him an ooshie or a Beyblade. I do not remember what exactly. Madness.

When I intervened gently, the child burst strangely into tears, inconsolable.

"Why was he crying?" My son later asked innocently, while I was driving.

"It's not resilient," I say, regretting it immediately.

"What is resilience?" He asked.

Awesome. Now, I had to explain the "resilience" to a 6-year-old who was driving a car in traffic. While my youngest son was singing the first 10 letters of the alphabet loop. Honestly, it's a miracle that my kids are still alive.

What is resilience? Good question.

But let's talk about Nintendo first and how it ruined my son.

& # 39; Mario Minecraft & # 39;

The day my son learned the meaning of the word "resilience," Nintendo released a downloadable pack of 20 SNES games for Nintendo Switch, free for all Nintendo online service subscribers.

I lost it. In the right direction. As a 38-year-old man who loves video games, nothing on this planet evokes more nostalgia than SNES games.

SNES, also called Super Nintendo, is one of the best hand-made game consoles. It has an incomparable library of games and the ability to play these games for free on the Nintendo Switch is a real celebration. Some absolute classics are on the list: Super Metroid, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, The Island of Yoshi.

My two children share my love of video games and I was looking forward to playing the games of my childhood with them. Children who terrifically refer to Mario 8 and 16-bit games are called "Mario Minecraft".

No surprise here: they loved them.

But one thing surprised me: the difficulty. My 6 year old is quite competent in the video game field – most recently, he played and finished Super Mario Odyssey on his own on Nintendo Switch – but Super Mario World? A game with limited save points, one – shot attacks and pretty tricky platforms? It was a frustrating experience for a child used to the gentle play of children today.

"Ah," I nodded in the most condescending way possible. "That's what video games were when dad was small. "

When the weather was rough in the north of my native Scotland, when we had an orange and a piece of coal in our Christmas stocking and we were thankful. When video games did not have constant checkpoints, or unlimited lives. When we played football with potatoes and walked 5 km barefoot to school, through the slush and ice pellets and greet.

Listen, I am painfully aware of having become the worst possible version of my own grandparents in 2019. The absolute worst. I accept this

The maverick

I am also a terrible parent. Terrible. At present, we drive to school and my son's lunchbox contains a handful of Ritz cookies. I am lazy. I scream too much. Sometimes I boil two eggs, pour a box of cold baked beans and call it dinner.

But the only thing that fascinates me as a father is to ensure the resilience of my children. For me, resilience is the best gift that a parent can make to a child.

My definition of resilience? The ability to go through difficult times. The ability to fail and try until the job is done. Take advantage of difficult times and revel in lessons learned. "Your brain is growing," my wife and I say to our children whenever something pushes their limits physically or mentally.

I do a lot of stupid things to try to build resilience.

To earn pocket money, for example, I challenge my children. Yes, that's right. I literally pay my kids' money when they realize something that has pushed their limits. Some of these challenges are educational, others are quite ridiculous. Once, I gave $ 5 to my child for it to plunge into an outdoor pool in the heart of the winter. When he was 5, I gave him $ 10 because he learned by himself to turn around on a trampoline. He has $ 20 to wait when he learns his multiplication tables.

Does it work? No idea. And if someone said they know, they almost certainly do not do it. Parenthood is a dark and mysterious black hole that engulfs logic instead of light. Nobody understands what works and they say that they do it, they are full of shit.

All I know is that I do not want to pay my children for them to do chores or to win at the science fair because kids should do chores and win the BY science fair. DEFAULT. I would rather pay for flips and jump in the pools on really cold days.

What can I say? I am a nonconformist.

We both messed up

Anyway. Back to video games. Back on Nintendo. It messed up. Highligths.

In fact, you know what, we are both to blame. we both fair.

The problem I am referring to: The Nintendo rewind feature has been added to the SNES games available on the Nintendo switch.

It's a practical thing. If you die or if you have forgotten something important, you can press ZR and ZL buttons together. rewind the game, rub your mistake of existence. This is a kind of concession. Old video games are less tolerant, seems to say Nintendo, so here … have a rewind function, puny kids.

In a moment of weakness, forgetting all of my great ideas on teaching resilience, I showed my 6 year old son backtracking after spending a good five minutes complaining about how he was doing. a boss battle against Super Mario World. "Here, do that," I said, catching the switch impatiently.

Rewind. Easy. Oops.

And that was it. Moment of teaching past. Have a hard time on this video game son? Here's how you can completely and totally fool your way to victory.

So it's the fault of Nintendo who created this rewind feature. But that's my failing to show my son how to use it. Man finished game, game over.

Now, my son uses the rewind feature constantly. He uses it whenever he dies. He uses it when he loses a power-up. It just uses it for fun, so much so that its use of the rewind function is almost a game in itself, designed specifically to create a "perfect" performance, where nothing goes wrong, where everything happens easily.

A world where no resilience is required.

What is Nintendo? And what the heck in front of me? What were you thinking? Years of hard work, thanks to a feature that deprives the future Mark of his ability to use video games for learning moments and to prepare my children to meet the challenges of real life.

Will my child be able to use a rewind feature when he or she is fired for taking an hour late at work? Or put a pregnant girl in high school?

Will he be able to push ZR / ZL when he does not look twice before crossing the road and getting run over by a garbage truck?

Nintendo, do you like it. What are we doing here? What am I supposed to do? To be a better parent? It's too late for that. I am six years old at the bottom of this concert and I am a disaster. The worst. That's why I need big companies – like Nintendo – to make my job easier, not harder. Jesus. Nintendo: Delete the rewind function. Do my job for me. Is it too much to ask?

I need all possible help.