Webkinz. It seemed like such a fun thing when we heard about it. Most of her soccer friends were involved in it and for a minute I felt clueless and like a mad mom. I know I shouldn’t feel that way over commercial stuff but at times I do.
So it turns out they are this stuffed animal you get with a code to login to the Webkinz.com website where you get a virtual pet just like the stuffed one. The online pet has a room you can outfit and the site has all sorts of games. Think of it as a kiddie cross between The Sims and Second Life.
We are very conscious about Hayle’s online activity. Her PC isn’t online so she gets online on my or Jeff’s laptop, in the living room with us. My first concern with this was the way they could communicate with friends on there. Fellow parents assured me it was all preset options, meaning all the interactions are from a menu of already scripted comments and completely safe. So I got her the small version of the stuffed animal and away we started down this path.
I was surprised to find it does have some educational uses. Some of the games are educational, you have some elements of budgeting and the pet does better with healthy food. But it does encourage too much commercialism in my eyes. I try to play with her and direct her towards a healthy balance of fun and educational games. I found myself playing some of the games just to kill some time and then I found myself logging in to get certain deals for her.
Jeff and I are both gamers. We’ve allowed Hayley to play with us at times at our games and we’ve got several games systems at home. I’m online frequently because I develop sites and I work from home. I think we’ve done some lousy modeling because Hayley is so interested in playing webkinz. She wants to call her friends and have them get on ALL the time. She wants to play it as often as possible and she ends up not playing it often because she has pestered and pestered us for our laptops. UGH.
Did we create this webkinz monster with our playing our games in front of her? Does she think my being online for work - and for pleasure, including my sanity-needed blogging, is just one big game? Does she think that — ooo wait, that pink chair on sale from 2pm-3pm, I gotta run buy it for her.
