Why I Never Let My Kids Quit... Anything

Quitting. We quit jobs, we quit marriages, we walk out on friendships and sometimes we let people down when the going gets tough. Sometimes it is necessary, even the right thing to do. Our kids quit teams and music lessons, art classes and after school programs. Sometimes it's necessary, but sometimes they are bored or don't like the coach or would just rather play video games at home. Deciding when to let your child quit something, be it Gymboree, Little League or SAT prep, is a question that never goes away.

My kids have tried it all. I have driven them to sports, found drum teachers, glass blowing lessons, painting and ceramics classes. They have tried their hands at their school newspapers, student government, ESL tutoring and computer programming camp, though why that qualifies as camp, I am sure that I will never know. In the end, they did not commit to most of these activities and no one in our house plays lacrosse or is student body president, but at the same time, I never let them quit a single activity.

Our rule is simple: Try any activity that we have the resources to make possible. Go once, go even twice but if you commit, I told my kids, there will be no quitting. At the risk of overgeneralizing, I think our children have so many choices of ways to enrich their lives that quitting has become an easy response to frustration or boredom. I regret many of the things in life that I quit, not because I was enjoying them when I left, but because if I had stuck it out and reached any sort of competency, I might have found that illusive enjoyment.

In reality, this meant that my kids had to stick with a team until the season finished or an art class until the sessions ended. There was no walking out on computer camp because it was dumb or quitting drums because we recognized a dearth of musical talent. Every activity was to be seen through to completion.

Why was I so tough on them? Why draw what might seem like an arbitrary line in the sand?

Constancy, commitment and loyalty are all values I hoped to instill in my sons. Learning to endure something even when it became boring or unpleasant, when the coach or teacher didn't like my kid, or vice versa, seemed a lesson truly worth teaching. I thought that the first time I let them walk away from something just because at that moment it didn't suit them was the last time I had any credibility about endurance or resilience because the refrain henceforth would have been, "but you let me quit...."

Over time, my kids learned they were never going to allowed to quit things so they should be careful about what they committed themselves to, because the word commit was going to be taken literally. The result? Good things and bad. Perhaps they didn't try things they might have, although we usually made clear up front that you could try something (say by going once or twice) but after they signed up we were done with discussions.

But we had bad days, really frustrating end-of-my-rope days. There were tantrums and miserable practices and screaming scenes where I reminded them that this was something they had said they wanted to do. The upside? They had long, enduring relationships with instructors, coaches and teammates who changed and enriched their lives. One high school son has been on the same soccer team for nine years. It is the stuff that childhood memories are made of.

I sound so confident now, but on a weekly and sometimes daily basis I was wracked by self-doubt and misgivings and even now am not sure if what I did was right. The one thing that I have observed is this: My college-age sons have true passions, things they study in school and activities they are involved in outside of the classroom.

Passions are not like dreams for most of us, we don't wake up one morning and find they have miraculously come to us in the night. Parents often talk about helping kids find their passions. But passions do not always reveal themselves unbidden, as often they are a result of hard work and dedication, the joy that comes of doing something well.

My kids' passions are the result of endless hours spent learning a subject or mastering a skill. In each case, it is something that in childhood they begged and pleaded with me to quit and in late adolescence they have told me how much they enjoy. I made them stick things out because mastery, even at a child's level takes time and repetition. Competence breeds confidence but success and accomplishment breed self-esteem and social well-being. Should I have let them walk away knowing this?

This weekend, my 19-year-old son drove 10 hours with his college club team to play in a tournament in a sport that, many mid-seasons ago during his childhood, he begged to quit. He had sent text messages about how great being on this team has been and how much he has enjoyed playing. Yet in a particular parenting low point, I pushed his 12-year-old self out of the car to make him play when the practices had ramped up and become far more difficult. Did I do the right thing?

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/grown-and-flown/quitting_b_2162195.html

How to Make Baseball Practice Fun

As a baseball coach, you not only have to teach your team the fundamentals of the game, you have to make learning those fundamentals fun so that your players stay interested and engaged. Use the tips in the following list to make baseball practice fun:

Source: http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/how-to-make-baseball-practice-fun.html

Baseball Practice Drills – Pickle

A common situation in baseball is the run down.  A player caught in between two bases – either one of them being safe.  Executing a proper defensive set up is important to getting the out. Pickle is a classic baseball practice drill you can add to your workouts.

What you need (set up):  Set up a number of stations that is divisible by three.  You will need three people per station (2 fielders, 1 runner).

All distance between bases is 30 feet (in all directions)Baseball Practice Drills

How this drill works: The fielders need to work the ball back and forth in an attempt to get the runner out.  The runner needs to try to advance to third base or get back safely to second.  You can award the fielders two points if they get the runner out.  One point if they get the runner back to second, zero points if the runner gets to third base.  Play the game until the fielders get 5 points.  Rotate the players at this point.

Result:  Both the runners and the fielders will understand what they need to do when they are in this situation – both on offense and defense.  Rundowns occur often in Little League ball, and even in high school league with regularity.  It is good for young players to know how to get the out.

Note:  Once the players have mastered this aspect of the drill, then you should advance it to the standard tactic where players are backing each other up and rotating as the rundown advances.

Technorati Tags: baseball, Pickle, baseball practice drill, high school

Source: http://www.baseball-tutorials.com/baseball-practice-drills-pickle/15/

The BEST High School Baseball players in the country- (Part 2)

A day in the Life the best high school baseball players in the country.

JEREN KENDALL | 2014 Vanderbilt Baseball Commit

COLE TUCKER | 2014 Pittsburgh Pirates 1st Rd. Draft Pick

JOSH MORGAN | 2014 Texas Rangers 3rd Rd. Draft Pick

JACOB GATEWOOD | 2014 Milwaukee Brewers 1st Rd. Draft Pick

RYAN JOHNSON | TCU Baseball Commit & Top 2015 MLB Draft Prospect

Youth baseball is 90% mental

Jim Wohlford, a Major League outfielder who played in the '70s and '80s said, "Baseball is ninety percent mental half the time." He was talking about Major League baseball. Youth baseball is ninety percent mental, period.

Ted Williams said, "Hitting is 50% from the neck up." He was talking about Major League hitting, where the ball players have nothing else to do all year. In youth baseball, where practice time is a tiny fraction of what a Major Leaguer has, you cannot make much progress on anything but the mental aspects.

Why? There are only about 40.5 hours of practice in the entire season of a youth baseball team. After the first year or two of a player's career, typically around age five and six, physical things like batting and pitching mechanics change only at a glacial pace. Pro hitting consultant Oscar Miller says it takes 10,000 swings the new way to change your swing. That's because your swing must be instinctive. Since you have already grooved the "wrong" way be swinging 10,000 times, you have to swing thousands of times to get rid of the old way and thousands more to groove the new way. Does a youth baseball coach have time to closely supervise 10,000 swings of each of his players? Not even close.

It takes at least ten seconds to do one swing against a ball on a tee or shadow swing (no ball). 10,000 x 10 = 100,000 seconds. That's 100,000 ÷ 60 = 1,667 minutes or 1,667 ÷ 60 = 27.8 hours---per player! That does not include warm-ups or breaks.

Not only do you not have enough time to closely supervise 27.8 hours of swings every ten seconds for each of your twelve to fourteen players, your players simply do not want to swing the bat in a drill 10,000 times.

Finally, even if you had the time and your players had the motivation, doing so would probably hardly change their success at all and might even make them less successful batters. That's what happened to me. I did do the 10,000 swings. More actually. I had a prettier swing afterward. Got lots of compliments. But my hitting seemed to be a little worse! My original, unprofessionally trained swing used a shorter stroke. Switching to the traditional longer stroke seemed to have a bigger negative effect on my hitting than achieving optimum mechanics had a good effect.

Arizona State University head baseball coach Pat Murphy said, in the 11/99 issue of the American Baseball Coaching Association's Coaching Digest, "I believe coaches tend to overcoach and overanalyze the mechanics of the swing. I believe the mental side of hitting makes all the difference."

People reading this probably know a player with a tremendous work ethic or a youth player with a "stage" father who got his son tons of professional lessons. The typical result is that the kid looks great when he swings, but he doesn't hit that much better after all the lessons.

In the pros, they have both the time and motivation to work on both their mechanics and their mental attitude. Thus Wohlford's comment that "[Major League] baseball is ninety percent mental half the time." Because of the far less time and motivation, "Youth baseball is ninety percent mental all of the time." In youth baseball, you absolutely do not have the time to work on batting mechanics and few, if any, of your players have the motivation to do the necessary amount of swings to make a change.

Conclusion #1: Do not mess with your players' mechanics.

This applies mainly to hitting and to a lesser extent to pitching and fielding of grounders and throwing by fielders.

Self-confidence is crucial to success in hitting, pitching, and fielding grounders.

Conclusion #2: If you do not have time to fix "incorrect" mechanics, you must not breathe a word about them, because if you do, you will hurt your players' confidence.

It may take ten thousand swings to improve your mechanics, but it only takes ten seconds to destroy a kid's confidence. Just one "You're pulling your head" should do it. To put it another way, if you are not going to get them to do it "right," you must not tell them they are doing it "wrong."

Conclusion #3: If you cannot devote any effort to mechanics, you must spend your coaching effort on the only thing that is left, the MENTAL aspects.

All of which leads me to my initial statement: youth baseball is 90% mental. There are some things, like sliding or the catcher's throw to second, where many practice repetitions are necessary and effective. There are many other skills, like knowing where to go when the ball is not hit to you, that require both chalk talk and at least a few physical repetitions to learn. These things constitute the 10% of youth baseball that is physical.

In my hardball career, which started around age six and continued until I was 46, there were several times when my hitting took a quantum leap upward. I do not recall my hitting ever improving gradually except when I first started playing at age six. Here are the events that caused my hitting to improve dramatically overnight starting at age ten:

   Decided to stop worrying about striking out
   Got a lighter bat
   Started swinging only at hitters' pitches on the first two strikes
   Went to a fake-bunt-and-slash type swing on third strikes
   Note that each of these is mental. None involve subtle changes in mechanics. I hasten to add that I      tried many subtle changes in my mechanics over the years. They had little or no effect.

Initially as a coach, I learned all the "right" mechanics and taught them to my players. To my amazement, I found that my highly-trained players hit worse than our opponents and probably worse than they did before all my training. Although we did get compliments about how pretty our swings were. Then, in a subsequent season, I tried doing absolutely no drilling of mechanics all season. As I suspected, we did great!

About all I did regarding those three areas was talk. Experienced teachers know that what they do mainly is try to find as many ways as possible to explain something because each individual seems to need a different explanation for the light bulb to go on. I explained in as many ways as I could dream up why it was crucial to only swing at pitches right down the pipe on the first and second strike. I proved to my players that this was correct by charting every pitch thrown in each of our games and going over each at bat for every player with the whole team. After about ten days to two weeks, they were convinced and concentrated on only using their first two strikes to swing at choice pitches. Our team batting average, on-base, slugging etc. jumped up dramatically.

Once, when I was a semi-pro player-coach, I chewed my team out in the team newsletter for not getting walks 25% of the time like our best player in that department. (My walk percentage was 22% at the time.) Our team had a dramatic upswing in our walks percentage instantly, starting with the very next game.

If you think back over your own playing career, I'll bet you will find that your own progress in hitting came not as a gradual upward slope, but rather in distinct steps like a stairway. Furthermore, those steps stemmed from mental breakthrough insights or large changes in your approach. This happens to Major Leaguers when they break out of slumps. Mark McGwire says he broke out of a slump, not gradually, but overnight, because of a piece of good advice yelled at him by a fan in the stadium as he was going into the tunnel to the locker room.

I once invented a training device to teach kids to keep their head down when they swung the bat. I simply took a large, old, batting helmet and attached a steel shelf support to top of the brim with two bolts. When you wore the helmet, the steel rod stuck out about three feet to the front. I would squat down and hold the rod while the kid wearing the helmet hit poly balls off a tee. Kids wanted to turn their head, but the helmet would not let them. They were quite uncomfortable at first, but they quickly got used to the fact that they could not pull their head.

So none of my Little Leaguers ever pulled their heads again after I invented this, right? No, they kept pulling their heads in games. The device worked, but slowly. I simply did not have time to let them take the necessary thousands of swings with the device on their head. If I were a year-round batting instructor who got the same kids for hundreds of hours, I would use the device.

So if you want to optimize your players' performance in hitting, pitching, and fielding grounders, focus almost entirely on the mental aspects of those skills. Teach, encourage, persuade, cajole, coax, remind. That goes 180 degrees against the traditional belief---that you learn by doing, not by talking. But this is baseball, the world's weirdest sport. Furthermore, in youth baseball, you only have time for the mental approach in the three areas of hitting, pitching/throwing, and fielding grounders.

I highly recommend that youth baseball coaches read two books: The Mental Game of Baseball by H. A. Dorfman and Karl Kuehl and The Mental ABC's of Pitching by H.A. Dorfman. Also, most good baseball books devote a chapter or much space within other chapters to the mental aspects of the game. As far as hitting, pitching/throwing, and fielding grounders are concerned, the mental game should be the main focus of youth coaches who are trying to learn how to coach their teams better.

Good luck,

John T. Reed

Source: http://www.johntreed.com/mental.html

Our Biggest Mistake: Talent Selection Instead of Talent Identification

Many youth sports coaches claim to be great talent identifiers, and point to the results of their 11 year all star team as proof. Yet they are not talent identifiers. They are talent selectors. The difference could not be more striking, or more damaging to our country’s future talent pool in many sports.

Talent selection is the culling of players with the current ability to participate and be successful in events taking place in the near future. Talent identification, on the other hand, is the prediction of future performance based upon an evaluation of current physical, technical, tactical and psychological qualities. Talent selection is pretty simple; talent identification is an art. One yields great results today; the other builds elite athletes and winning teams for the future.

Our current win at all costs youth sports culture promotes talent selection. When a coach is pressured to win by parents or a club, or when he or she feels the need to win to serve their own ego, that coach becomes a talent selector. When you are focused on talent selection, you are picking athletes to help you win now, and cutting ones that will not. You are looking at current athleticism, technical ability, and traits to help achieve short term success. You naturally select the biggest, strongest and fastest young athletes, and play them extensive minutes. You limit playing time for the kids who are not up to snuff, and tell them they need to work harder, get tougher, etc., if they want to play more. You yell at them because they cannot get to the ball quick enough, or cannot shoot well enough to score. You tell them that this type of pressure is what they will face when they are older, so they better get used to it now.

Then, according to the latest statistics, 70% of them quit organized sports by the age of 13!

On the other hand, talent identifiers are searching for young players who may not be elite athletes yet, but possess the physical and psychological attributes to eventually become one. Perhaps they have not yet grown, or been exposed to high level coaching. Perhaps they are not as skillful yet, but show a high level of coachability, sensitivity to training, and the motivation to learn. Identifying talent requires the skill to weigh all the physical, physiological, psychological, and technical components of an athlete, as well as a measure of “gut instinct” of which kid has what it takes to become elite, and which kid does not.

Talent identification also takes a long term approach to player selection and development, and focuses on training large numbers of players, instead of cutting all but the elite ones. It recognizes that many factors affect whether a kid will make it or not, but rarely are childhood results the main factor.

In a fascinating study on junior tennis players from 1994 through 2002, Piotr Unierzyski evaluated 1000 players age 12-13 in 50 different countries, a pool that included future stars Roger Federer, Kim Clisters, and others. His study found that of all these players, the ones who eventually made it into the 

Top 100 Professional Rakings were:

• 3-4 months younger than the mean age for their group
• Slimmer and less powerful than their age group
• Usually faster and more agile than average
• They played less than the average number of matches that the top players did
• Their average practice hours per week were 2-4 hours less than the elite players in their age group
• Their parents were supportive, but not overly involved

Let’s extrapolate this data onto the current elite youth athlete in the United States. Does a player who is young for his or her age, thinner and weaker, practices and plays less than their peers, and has parents who are not overly involved sound like today’s  U11 All Star? Not that I have seen. Now, I know that is quite an over simplification, but do you get my point here?

American youth sports are far too often focused on talent selection, and not talent identification. We are committed to winning now, to getting on ESPN, or achieving some hypothetical pre-pubescent national ranking. Yes, some team sport clubs have B and C teams and develop large numbers of players. Others have those same B and C teams, and players are often jettisoned there with less experienced coaches, less committed teammates, and an overall lesser experience. We say we are developing them for the future, but all too often we are using them to balance the budget. We select the current talent that will help us win now, because if we do not, the club down the road will grab them and win, and our best players will leave. We are not identifying and developing the kids who are most likely to become elite competitors after puberty. We are selecting the ones who already are elite, but often do not have the characteristics needed for long term elite performance.

This is why the emphasis on winning prior to high school is destroying youth sports. This is why nations with 1/100th of our population can compete with us on a world stage in many sports. They actually identify and develop future talent, instead of selection based upon current results. Our wealth and sheer numbers allow us to succeed internationally, but other nations are slowly but surely closing the gap in nearly every sport because quite frankly, they identify and develop talent far better than we do.

How do we fix this? Here are a few simple thoughts for youth sports that to be honest, should not be that hard to implement:

Stop cutting players at young ages, and develop large numbers of players instead of just the elite ones. I recently read that Sweden, for example, produces more NHL players per capita than any other country, and they do not cut players till age 17. Hmmm.

Focus on developing all players at the youngest ages, with particular attention given to helping the less skilled ones catch up technically to the stronger ones. Thus, when they finish their growth spurt, we have a much larger pool of adequately skilled individuals to choose from, instead of just the kids who happened to have facial hair at 12 but stopped growing at 13.


Put an end to the win at all costs nature of pre-pubescent sports, especially things like state and national championships prior to middle or high school, and televising events like the Little League World Series (which has run since 1946 and produced a whopping 27 Major League Players in that time). Ok, admittedly, this one might be tough to implement!

Better educate our coaches to understand the difference between selecting and identifying talent, and then teach and encourage them to develop it rather than try and win with it immediately.

This is just a start, but unless we start making some drastic changes to our youth sports system, we will see smaller nations continuing to close the gap, and eventually surpass the United States in many sports. We are not elite in soccer yet because of the culture. We are falling behind in baseball because of it. Even in basketball, the gap has been significantly reduced. Why? Because our competitors are not relying on a player development system that is often based upon a large population and dumb luck.

The best part about making all these changes? Our clubs and schools will have larger numbers of skilled athletes to choose from, as well as additional healthier and well rounded kids. We will have families who are less stressed both financially and anxiety wise, because their kids can just be kids again, and they don’t feel pressured to have their 10 year olds travel 2000 miles to play a game. We will allow coaches to actually coach, and develop both better people and better athletes.

Abundant skilled players? Lower costs? Less time devoted to youth sports and more to family and school? More success for our national teams and elite individual athletes?

These are changes worth making.

Source: http://changingthegameproject.com/our-biggest-mistake-talent-selection-instead-of-talent-identification/

The Benefits of Video Games

In addition to understanding the many real concerns that today’s parents have with video games, it’s also worth considering the benefits and positive aspects that contemporary interactive entertainment choices provide.

Certainly, many popular titles today are M-rated and intended for discerning adults, given the average age of today’s gaming audience. But the vast majority of games can be played by a broad range of ages and still manage to be fun and engaging without resorting to foul language or violence.

“Games can definitely be good for the family,” says the ESRB’s Patricia Vance. “There’s plenty of selection. Oftentimes I think parents feel that they’re not because video games in the media are portrayed as violent, and hardcore games tend to get the lion’s share of publicity. But parents also need to be comforted knowing that E for Everyone is by far largest category [of software]. Nearly 60 percent of the almost 1,700 ratings we assigned last year were E for Everyone, which means there’s a huge selection of games available that are appropriate for all ages.”

In fact, most video games do have quite a few redeeming qualities – even those with violent content.

All games can and do have benefits for players, and in a number of different and sometimes surprising ways.

Educational Benefits for Students

A recent study from the Education Development Center and the U.S. Congress-supported Ready To Learn (RTL) Initiative found that a curriculum that involved digital media such as video games could improve early literacy skills when coupled with strong parental and teacher involvement. Interestingly, the study focused on young children, and 4- and 5-year-olds who participated showed increases in letter recognition, sounds association with letters, and understanding basic concepts about stories and print.

The key for this study was having high-quality educational titles, along with parents and teachers who were equally invested in the subject matter. That way kids could discuss and examine the concepts that they were exposed to in the games. Also interesting is the value that video games are proven to have even for very young players. A study by the Education Department Center further found that low-income children are “better prepared for success in kindergarten when their preschool teachers incorporate educational video and games from the Ready to Learn Initiative.”

Older children such as teens and tweens can benefit from gameplay as well. Even traditional games teach kids basic everyday skills, according to Ian Bogost, associate professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and founder of software maker Persuasive Games. “Look at ‘World of Warcraft’: You’ve got 11-year-olds who are learning to delegate responsibility, promote teamwork and steer groups of people toward a common goal.”

Games that are designed to help teach are having an impact on college-age pupils as well. Following a recent 3D virtual simulation of a US/Canadian border crossing, wherein students assumed the role of guards, Loyalist College in Ontario reported that the number of successful test scores increased from 56 percent to 95 percent.

Educational Benefits for Adults
Surprise: Adults can learn something and benefit from video games, too.
As mentioned earlier, research underway by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) indicates that video games can help adults process information much faster and improve their fundamental abilities to reason and solve problems in novel contexts. In fact, results from the ONR study show that video game players perform 10 percent to 20 percent higher in terms of perceptual and cognitive ability than non-game players.

As Dr. Ezriel Kornel explains on WebMD.com, playing certain video games (e.g. Brain Age or Guitar Hero) can also improve hand-eye coordination, enhance split-second decision making and even, potentially, boost auditory perception. Just playing isn’t enough, though, says Dr. Kornel. The key is that you have to be improving each time you play, because in order to improve you have to be learning.

“Anytime the brain is in learning mode,” Kornel says, “there are new synapses forming between the neurons. So you’re creating thousands of connections that can then be applied to other tasks as well.”
Someday, a video game might even save your life, as games are already benefiting students and practitioners in the medical field too.

A study published in the February edition of Archives of Surgery says that surgeons who regularly play video games are generally more skilled at performing laparoscopic surgery.

In addition, according to Dr. Jeffrey Taekman, the director of Duke University’s Human Simulation and Patient Safety Center, “serious games and virtual environments are the future of education.”

Besides offering medical students the ability to practice on patients (which is much safer in the digital world), simulations offer health care providers several upsides. Chief among them, Taekman says, are the abilities to make choices, see results and apply information immediately.

Beyond allowing for greater scalability and group collaboration than traditional classrooms, every decision made in a virtual world, he continues, can be tracked and benchmarked against best practices, then standardized or archived for others’ review. “The traditional textbook will soon become passé,” he suggests. “Gaming platforms will offer an interactive way for students to learn and apply information in context.”

Improved Multitasking
Other carefully-designed studies have also shown that action video games can improve several aspects of brain activity, including multitasking. According to studies by Daphne Bavelier, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester, video gamers show real-world improvements on tests of attention, accuracy, vision and multitasking after playing certain titles.

“If you think about it, the attentional and working memory demands of video games can be much greater than other tasks,” says Michael Stroud, a professor of psychology at Merrimack College. “Consider Pac-Man as an example. In Pac-Man, you must navigate your character through a spatial layout while monitoring the separate paths of four additional objects (the ghosts), while keeping the overall goal of clearing the small pellets in memory, as well as keeping track of the remaining large pellets.”

“Think about how this may apply to skills such as driving,” he continues. “When you drive your car, you are faced with a constantly changing environment in the road, not to mention several other distractions that compete for attention that reside in the car. At the same time, you are attempting to navigate through the environment to reach a goal.”

Social Benefits
Games with broad appeal that are easy to grasp can additionally help many families play together, and better bridge the gap between generations. Consider a title like hip-wiggling simulation Just Dance, which can have young kids dancing alongside their grandparents.

There are also many games that have positive social messages that encourage families to be a force for good. In a series of experiments published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, researchers found that participants who had just played a “pro-social” game in which characters must work together to help each other out as compared to those who had just played a “neutral” game (e.g. Tetris) were more likely to engage in helpful behaviors. Examples included assisting in a situation involving an abusive boyfriend, picking up a box of pencils or even volunteering to participate in more research.

So-called “serious games,” specifically designed to teach and inform, are also having an impact on the world. Titles like the United Nations’ Food Force teach kids about real-life issues, humanitarianism and the practical challenges facing governments and private organizations today. In the game, children must complete six different missions that reflect the real-life obstacles faced by the World Food Programme in its emergency responses. Other games, like Nourish Interactive’s online Chef Solus and the Food Pyramid Adventure, teach kids about the benefits of healthy eating habits, while still more highlight pressing geopolitical and social issues, e.g. the Global Conflicts series.

Upsides can even extend into the physical world. Consider Facebook game Ecotopia. In summer 2011, players of the popular social game met a challenge from its creators and planted 25,000 trees in the game world in 25 days, leading the game’s developer to plant 25,000 trees in real life.

Encouraging Cooperation and Teamwork
Many games today also emphasize the cooperative aspects of game play, in which two or more players need to work together in order to reach a common goal. For instance, games like Lego Star Wars or Kirby’s Epic Yarn are enhanced by having players cooperate to solve in-game puzzles.
Massively multiplayer games such as LEGO Universe and Lord of the Rings Online further offer added depth, atmosphere and enjoyment by allowing players to band together and work as a team in order to complete certain quests or defeat especially tricky opponents. Game industry analysts such as DFC Intelligence actually predict that video game revenue will reach nearly $70 billion by 2015, thanks in large part to these online, cooperative, subscription-based games that can be played together. Small wonder top titles like Star Wars: The Old Republic and Titan (the next MMO from Blizzard, the company that created World of Warcraft) continue to resonate so strongly with millions worldwide.

Even the way that games are made can encourage teamwork. At Washburn University in Kansas, students study the game development process as a way to build teamwork and collaborative skills.
“It taught me to work in a group,” said Washburn student Adam Bideau of the program in a recent interview with the Washburn Review. “Video games are not created by just one person and they require you to work well with others. You have to pool everyone’s talents together in order to produce the required product.”

Building Confidence
Researchers from McGill University’s Department of Psychology have created and tested computer games that are specifically designed to help people enhance their self-acceptance. The researchers drew on their experience playing repetitive computer games and devised novel counterparts that would help people feel more positive about themselves.

Even games that aren’t specifically designed to do so can still help kids feel a sense of achievement, based simply on the basic principles involved in what makes a good game. Through puzzles, exploration and discovery, players learn to succeed in ways that some researchers say our brains actually prefer. Most games are designed to introduce a concept, such as jumping, and then provide players with an opportunity to master it. Players are then free to explore and utilize and achieve success with this new skill, growing in self-confidence all the while.

Promoting Exercise
All parents know that kids need a healthy combination of physical and mental exercise. Happily, today’s motion-controlled games for Microsoft’s Xbox 360 Kinect, Nintendo’s Wii and Wii U, and Sony’s PlayStation Move help kids get both kinds of workouts at the same time.

Better yet, people of all ages are finding them a more approachable way to stay physically fit. While many shy away from exercise because they see it as an activity that isn’t enjoyable, organizations like the American Heart Association now cite, and even recommend, video games as a fun and entertaining way to enjoy physical activity.

Upsides of active play are considerable too. A study reported in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine of 39 Boston middle-school children who played with six different interactive gaming systems found that the games “compared favorably with walking on a treadmill at three miles per hour, with four out of the six activities resulting in higher energy expenditure.”

Organizations supporting individuals of all ages and interests are additionally using active games to help get people up and moving. Nursing homes, cruise ships and even after-school programs all now employ active video games in some form to help stimulate both the mind and body.

Group and Social Play
Video games can also have some very important effects on family relationships, and deserve to be thought of as something that can – and should – be played together.

It’s always seemed obvious to families that activities like playing board games, make-believe, or even making music together could strengthen the family bond. But many parents view video games as a solitary, sedentary, time-wasting activity, when the truth is that video games have in fact emerged as a viable option for family game time that can potentially offer great benefits to families who are willing to enjoy them together. You won’t be alone if you do decide to take the plunge either. According to the ESA, 45 percent of parents play computer and video games with their children at least weekly, an increase from 36 percent in 2007.

Families that embrace playing video games as part of their everyday life are likely to find themselves enjoying a greater sense of cohesion and communication than families who still view video games as an idle, meaningless and solitary pursuit. As a result, it’s small wonder that so many in this day and age are putting away the cards and dice and turning to high-tech alternatives for modern family game nights.

Moving, thinking, cooperating, helping, learning, empathizing, growing, seeing the world from other perspectives… video games can help kids and families do all these things and more. So talk to your friends, do the research and seek out games that your family likes to play and that you as parents are comfortable with, then consider making play a part of your regular routine. Chances are, you won’t just have a great time – you’ll also make lasting memories and connections with your kids while doing so.

Source: http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/technology/2011/12/the-benefits-of-video-games/