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Feeding the Need

When my oldest son was little, anytime we bought a new videogame he couldn't pull himself away from it to do other things and it caused problems. Rather than punish him for it, I ultimately established a policy of only buying new videogames on a Friday so he had all weekend to play before he needed to try to focus on schoolwork again.

That successfully solved that problem. It would only be when he was much older that he would be able to articulate that he needed a big block of time with a new game to meet his intellectual needs and be able to wrap his brain around it in a way that worked for him.

When he was sixteen, he and his brother sold one of their videogame systems and all the games that went with it and got like $200 in store credit and a bunch of new games for other systems. For the first time in his life, he had enough new games at one time to really feed his intellectual needs.

Over the next few weeks, his frantic, addict-like behavior was replaced with a zen-like calm. Although I had been trying hard before that to meet his intellectual needs, I wasn't really succeeding.

Once his needs were adequately met, he changed. He's never gone back to being the little basketcase he was as a child.

He has remained calm, cool and collected.

Of course that calm is maintained in part by making sure he continues to get his intellectual needs met. But it's not a big struggle like it was before he finally got the intellectual equivalent of "thanksgiving dinner" that one time and got to gorge himself.

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