Family Daze: About those ‘bored’ games

Let me just say at the outset: if you have kids, chances are that sooner or later you’ll be asked to play a board game.

And when it happens, don’t bother wasting your time making up flimsy excuses like suddenly having to change the oil in the car or re-roof the house.

Trust me, kids see right through this kind of stuff and will beg. And beg. And beg.

Now before you start yelling and quoting passages from parenting articles on self-esteem, family togetherness and quality time and all that, we all know what the real problem is here. It’s not actually playing the game.

No-sir-ee. The real problem is the win-lose aspect. Face it, in any board game someone has to lose. And more than likely it will either be you or your child.

Granted, some of the more enlightened parents will seize this as a golden opportunity to teach their child one of Life’s Important Lessons on how to be a good loser, a type of oxymoron in kid language.

Frankly, I am not that ambitious. Mainly because, if my past experience has taught me anything it’s that, by the time my daughter loses, it’s too late.

The last thing she wants is to hear is the first installment of my lecture series on "It’s-Not-About-Winning-or-Losing-It’s-About-Enjoying-the-Game" because she’s much too busy heaving the Candyland board across the room and grinding the four plastic gingerbread man into the picture of the Candy King with the soul of her shoe.

The other rough aspect of playing board games with your child is that for some reason, time comes to a screeching halt. All around you seasons come and go, new continents form, the sun burns itself out and new galaxies emerge, and you’re still sitting at the kitchen table playing the same game.

At no time is this phenomenon so apparent as when you play a game of Scrabble with two people who think Clifford books are advanced reading material. If you don’t believe me, go ahead, try it.

Our last game went something like:

My nine-year-old daughter: GO already, it’s your turn!

My seven-year-old son: I’m THINKING.

Thinking, mind you, is a state to be avoided at any cost. There’s no telling how long it could go on: minutes, hours, sometimes even years. In fact my friend, Donna, is still waiting for her daughter to make a word out of x w v p a — so they can wrap up a game they started back in 1984.

Another thing you want to avoid in this particular game is a debate about what, exactly, is the criteria of a real word. Once your kids are finished thinking, chances are they’ll try to pass off a word like "Zugg" and before you know it you’re giving a lecture series on proper phonetic word

structure, the philosophy on how literacy affects social structure, and the downfall of the English language.

Oh sure, you can always throw the game just to get it over with. You could misplace some letters, rearrange the tiles to make the word "quarmpt", and declare it all a tie. But somehow this just seems wrong.

Me, I choose to lose the old-fashioned way: honestly.

And guess what? The last time I lost, I even restrained myself from stomping on the game board and tossing the tiles across the room.

It’s not much but, hey, it’s a start.

Debbie Farmer is a humorist and mother holding down the fort in California. Readers can reach Debbie at [email protected] or at Debbie Farmer, c/o Oasis Newsfeatures, P. O. Box 2144, Middletown, Ohio, 45042.