Board Games Focus Attention

I recently read an article about Parental Leadership and Our Poverty of Attention. In it, the author discusses the need for parents to help their children learn to use their time wisely. He notes that the average American child spends more than 30 hours in front of the TV each week – which is about equal to the amount of time spent in school.

He also quotes Nobel prize winner Herbert Simon from more than two generations ago, who said “What information consumes is rather obvious. It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”

In today’s society we have an ever increasing number of sources competing for our attention. Thus our digital age requires enormous discipline and self-restraint to be intentional in our use of time. Without parental leadership, the pull of all the digital sources will completely consume the attention of our children.

Eliminate All Media?
Don’t get me wrong. We don’t eliminate media completely. We enjoy watching movies together and our kids love playing video games. But teaching how to balance our time is key. One of the things we do is limit our “screen time” to no more than an hour a day. Doing so helps us all be judicious in what we choose to watch and where we focus our attention.

And that’s where we feel board games and card games come in. They’re a fantastic way to focus children away from passively watching TV and other consuming media. And sitting down for 30 minutes or a couple hours with a board game or two is a great way to teach children how to concentrate and focus and think through strategies and witness their outcomes.

But if we don’t make parental leadership a priority with our family, then our children will simply “go with the flow” and will float along the river of TV, Internet, and digital media devices all around. Look for ways to create a balance in your family by including board games and card games into the mix. Model ways for your children to use their time wisely by exercising their mental capacities with some great board games.

Suggested Board Games

Depending on the age of your children, different board games will challenge them exercise their mind. For youngsters, some memory games are a great way to start. Some that we think are great for mental focus as they grow are Chess, Mastermind, Go, Quarto, Quoridor, Scrabble and Boggle. For teenagers, the options open up quite a bit more. We’ve done reviews on a number of games that are great for capturing a teenager’s focus.

One board game that may interest and challenge your teenagers is one we recently bought called Power Grid. Power Grid has many things going on at a time to focus on – auctions of a wide variety of power plants, fluctuating prices of resources as the supplies diminish, increasing costs of connecting to and powering cities, and the income you generating from powering cities in your network. It’s a great balancing game and can capture attention and focus for a couple hours with the brain churning the whole time. And the great thing is that it just begs for more when you’re done.

We wish you success in creating a good balance in your family.