Recently our 10 year-old son, Colin, discovered we had the original Halo for our old Xbox.  He saw it in storage and asked me if he could play it.  After checking the rating on it, and seeing that it was rated M, I told him that I didn’t think it was appropriate for his age due to violence, language or intensity but I wasn't sure so I’d ask dad about it.  Since I don’t have very much time, or desire for that matter, to play video games anymore I rely on published reviews and friends’ opinions on the appropriateness of certain games.  This was one game that I heard mentioned within some gaming circles as not necessarily deserving of the “Mature” rating.

We ultimately decided to let him play it.  I figured I could watch the kids play it as well as ask them if there was anything that bothered them about it.  After my husband also played it with our son, we decided that our 8 year old, Ethan, was mature enough to play it as well.  I’ll admit that I still had my reservations but I was taking a watch and see sort of approach with it.

About two weeks after the kids started playing it, we had an incident that made me realize that my kids were way more in tune with reality no matter what studies try to show about kids and video games.  It was right after dinner and the six of us were running around the house chasing each other.  Everyone was laughing and having a great time.  We were all at the point where we were out of breath so I decided to run upstairs to check the afternoon’s emails before it got too late.

It was about two minutes later that I hear our four year-old daughter, Keira, crying, and about sixty seconds after that Colin and Ethan came running upstairs with tears in their eyes saying “Dad needs you.”  You can imagine what I started to feel at that instant but I managed to take a deep breath and quickly go downstairs instead of panicking.

As soon as I walked in the kitchen, I was thankful that the first thing I saw was the quarter inch long, tiny cut above Keira’s eye.  If I had seen all of the blood first, I probably would have been as upset as the boys.  She was covered in blood from the top of one side of her head, down her arm and elbow, and down the side of her leg.  My husband was holding her and trying to calm her down so he hadn’t been able to determine where the blood had come from yet.  All I can figure is that since she had just been running around, her blood was really pumping and then when she hit her head of the side of the table, the first thing she most likely did was rub where she hurt herself, spreading the blood everywhere.

I got her cleaned up and put some medicine on her cut which had stopped bleeding just as quickly as it had started.  Then my ten year old looks up at me and says:

“Halo is nowhere near as scary as THAT was!”

My eight year-old, who was standing next to him with big tears in his eyes says, “Yeah!  I thought Keira was going to die.”

I will never, ever wonder if my kids truly understand the difference between video game violence and reality ever again!

(Thankfully, Keira didn’t need any stitches and it looked like a tiny scratch above her eye by the next day.)