Any parent will tell you that maintaining a positive relation with your children is not always an easy task. We don’t always have to be their friend, but we always have to be their parent. But we should do our best to be both — here’s part of what I’ve done to strengthen the bonds in our family.
The value of finding common interests
When our children were small, we sometimes would take them for short walks in the forest. This is something I used to love doing with my parents when I was a kid — in the forest, you can always find a new spot in which to play, a new hill to conquer, and new imaginary monsters to fend off. To me, the forest was always magical.
But as it turns out, my kids aren’t me, and they think the forest sucks. It’s a boring wasteland filled with too many mosquitos and not nearly enough computer screens. Even the age-old parenting trick of bringing snacks along didn’t work. It just turned the incessant “are we there yet” into an incessant “when will there be snacks.”
Clearly, playing in the forest wasn’t my kids’ thing. It was my thing. I soon realized that I can’t expect the kids to unconditionally come into my world and enjoy themselves any more than I could bring myself to play Cookie Clicker (an incredibly stupid game that they like) with them in their world. I had to find a common world — a common interest.
Enter Minecraft
Minecraft is an amazing game where you can build things, explore a vast and diverse world, and fight monsters together with other players. I came across the game back in 2010 on Reddit.com when the news broke that this odd block-building game had managed to sell a whooping 100.000 units before it even left the alpha stage. I bought it, and bought my children a copy each, and off we went to play. As a child, I loved Lego and this was the Lego of the new age. I would always run out of Lego blocks limiting the size of my castles, whereas in Minecraft you can always find more blocks to build with.
Minecraft resides where my childrens’ world and my world overlap. It’s a common interest, something that we all enjoy and that is precisely why it’s so valuable to us. Playing Minecraft with my children is never a compromise on anyone’s part — it’s something we all want to do. Even when we’re not playing, we sometimes discuss future builds and other Minecraft-related projects together at the dinner table.
Our Minecraft World
Since 2014, we have been playing (on and off) in the same world. We’ve built all manner of things together and by ourselves in our own corners in the world. Our current main project is creating a fantasy-style village together.
In a way, I would say that the building aspects of Minecraft is a limited form of art. Granted, it is not as free-form as painting or sculpting; but the way I hear my children discuss which rooftop materials go well with which types of walls, and how best to choose building sites in order to create a great view without obscuring existing buildings leads me to believe this is as close to making art as they’ll ever come. And the same goes for me. When I look back at the first things we built in this world, I realize how much our building skills have improved in the past seven years.
Our YouTube channel
Recently, we’ve even gone so far as to create our own YouTube channel where we document some of our exploits in this world of ours. We did this not because YouTube needs another Minecraft “Let’s play” series as they’re called; we did this for ourselves, and virtually no one else will watch them even though they’re publicly available. That’s okay, because it’s not for anyone else (and it’s in Swedish)— it’s our equivalence of video recording our family in real life with our phones. 50 years from now, those videos (which I will make sure to preserve) will be invaluable memories for my children; memories not only of Minecraft, but also — dare I say it — of their father.
The value of building relationships with your children
Sometimes when parents learn that their children have been out on the town causing problems, they defend themselves by saying, “What do you want me to do? They don’t listen to me! I can’t tie them down!” That is true, you can’t tie them down. When this happens, you’ve already lost that battle as a parent. You probably lost it years ago. In my case, I’m hoping that the relationship I’m building with my children now will help prevent future problems. I can’t make my children do what I say, but I can try to make them want to do what I say by building a relationship based on mutual love and trust.
Fellow parents — Find your Minecraft
I urge my fellow parents to find their family’s Minecraft — endeavor to find some common interest with your children, something you can let yourselves get engulfed in together, that you all enjoy. Not only will you enjoy it in the moment, but I think your relationship with your family will strengthen as a result.
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Does your family have a “Minecraft” — a common interest that you all love to engage in together? I’d love to hear your stories in the replies, or reach out to me on Twitter.
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This post was previously published on Medium.
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