TLP 146: It’s Time to Play!

Truth.Love.Parent.

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When I was very young my parents stopped playing games with me. I was such an arrogant little kid that I would expect to beat the adults in the room and then be furious when

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I didn't. So my parents didn't play with me until I learned to lose graciously. Welcome to Truth.

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Love. Parents. Where we use God's Word to become intentional premeditated parents.

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Here's your host, AM Brewster. Welcome to Season 6. This season we're focusing on daily life.

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We're going to discuss very specific issues such as chores and friends, pornography, allowances, pets, and what to do when the whole family is stressed.

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Of course, we're going to address it all from a biblical context with our highest goal to apply God's Word to our parenting.

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And I hope you're looking forward to the next three months. This is also a good time for you to take a moment to rate and review us on iTunes and Facebook.

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And if you're thinking about becoming a patron, and this is a great time to do that, I'd like to thank you for the consideration and invite you to go to our

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Patreon page to learn more. You can find that link by clicking on the five ways to support

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TLP link in the description of this episode. All right, so what better way is there to start a conversation about daily family life than discuss family time?

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My goal today is twofold. One, I'd like to discuss the importance of games. And two,

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I want to share with you some of my family's favorites and explain how they can be valuable to your family.

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And if you missed our last episode about what it means to have a valuable family, I encourage you to listen to it. It was super helpful.

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And while you're at it, think about listening to our show all the way back from the pilot season.

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Our content is evergreen and it's always relevant. And if you haven't heard those episodes, you're missing out. All right, so why is playing games with your kids so important?

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Well, first of all, there are some clear educational benefits. Kids of any age can learn their letters, numbers, shapes, and colors.

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Grouping is often a big part of game playing as well. There's also the hand -eye coordination inherent in many games.

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But let's be honest, games that accomplish these ends for younger children can often be taxing to an adult.

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Games like Candyland and Chutes and Ladders are mostly invented to handle the colors, numbers, and words, but for the most part, they're all chance and luck of the draw.

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But that doesn't mean they don't provide benefit far beyond the basics. Consider these two concepts, which are true for every single game and in every single family on the planet.

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Number one, we can't deny the relationship -building aspect of game playing.

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For those of you who don't know, I work full -time at Victory Academy for Boys. It's a boarding school for at -risk teens and we get all sorts of boys.

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In addition, I have an 11 -year -old boy and a 9 -year -old girl of my own in the house. One of the things we do to build relationships with our immediate family and the

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Victory family is to play games. And I tell the guys, not wanting to play a game with someone says more about your relationship with that person than it does your enjoyment of the game.

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Well, it was shortly after one such admonition that my then 7 -year -old daughter asked one of the guys to play

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Candyland with her. I saw this 16 -year -old scrapper looking down at my daughter. His eyes drifted up and met mine.

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I smiled at him and he said, sure. Well, after trashing him in the first game, he said, no, no, we're playing again.

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I'm pretty sure they played about six to seven games before he finally beat her. The point is, that was an amazing time for my little girl.

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They were both having so much fun and everyone else was having fun watching them. Honestly, I do believe it was fun for him too.

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He lightened up so much and I think they really enjoyed each other's company after that, just in a special way that maybe the other guys didn't.

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So, games are extremely important for building relationships and it goes far beyond card games and board games and tile games.

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Playing cars or dolls or soldiers or some of their other imaginative games is incredibly important to building lasting bonds with your child.

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And to be honest, I don't care if you don't like playing games. I don't care if you don't like imagining.

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It's good for our kids. It's good for our families. Let's not let our selfishness get in the way.

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Philippians 2 tells us that we need to do things for other people. First Corinthians 13 tells us that we need to not do things out of our own selfish motivations.

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We need to think of others and this is just good for them. There's also a lot in the media these days about reactive attachment disorder.

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I work with rad boys all the time and I hope to do a whole episode on reactive attachment at some point in the future, but I can tell you that purposeful and age -appropriate times of investment are undeniably necessary when working with those types of children.

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All right, number two, playing games with our kids gives us a perfect venue for teaching them to win and lose graciously and a host of other biblical concepts.

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Now I have to start with an important caveat. If you're a hardcore gamer who lives to squash everybody you play and who whines and makes accuses when you lose, then guess what you're going to teach your kids?

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Yeah, once again, we're being reminded that we can't expect to live our lives however we want and think our kids aren't going to turn out like us, but by the grace of God, they may not.

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It's true, but it's far more likely that they're going to live just like us. So dad, mom, we need to know what it is to win and lose graciously ourselves.

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How do we do that? Well, I think your family should listen to our four family loves series. If we love each other, it will be easy to play for enjoyment instead of domination.

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If you love each other, it's easy to celebrate another's victory. However, all of that becomes very difficult if you're being selfish.

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I know all about this personally. When I was very young, my parents stopped playing games with me. I was such an arrogant little kid that I would look at the game, make the judgment that, oh, this should be easy, and then expect to beat all the adults in the room and then be furious when

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I didn't. My parents actually told me that they wouldn't play with me anymore until I learned to lose graciously.

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By God's grace, nowadays, nearly every time I teach a game to someone, they end up winning and I lose terribly.

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I try my best to help them understand the game, learn the strategy, keep them from making newbie mistakes, and not destroy them.

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Of course, you know, later on, yeah, I mean, sure, I'll try my hardest to play them and to beat them as they grow, but I'm never out to win the game.

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I'm out to have a good time. One more thing that's helped me to learn to be content with losing is a lesson

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I learned from Proverbs 16, 33. A few weeks ago, my family was playing Yahtzee, and my daughter rolled a

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Yahtzee. That's a roll where all five of the dice land on the same number. Then my son rolled a Yahtzee. Then my wife rolled a

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Yahtzee. And that's just really amazing. It's amazing for one person to roll a Yahtzee, let alone three people in a row. And then

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I didn't roll a Yahtzee the entire game. In fact, I seriously lost that game.

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Well, after I didn't get a Yahtzee over and over, my daughter patted me on the shoulder and she said that she was really sorry for me.

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I must have been in the spirit at that time because I told her that it really was okay. Yahtzee is a game of chance, and Proverbs 16, 33 says that the lot or the die is cast into the lap, but it's every decision is from the

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Lord. Our God is sovereign over the toss of a die, the selection of a card, and the choosing of a tile.

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When we or our children get annoyed because we didn't get the number or color or animal or whatever we wanted, we're showing our discontentment with God's sovereignty in our lives and ignoring

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Romans 8, 28 through 29 that promises that even when we lose a game, God wants to use that occasion to mature us into the image of Christ.

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Now we could talk the rest of the day about the benefits of playing games, from the basic number and color recognition to the mature concepts of understanding and applying strategy to the deeper spiritual realities that can be taught through games.

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They are just so important. So now I want to share with you what our game closet or really our game cabinets look like and tell you how playing these games can be great for your family.

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First though, let's remind ourselves of the top three reasons to play any and all games. Number one, they facilitate fun relationship building.

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Two, they can be used to teach biblical concepts including love, graciousness, mercy, kindness, justice, and trust.

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And three, they're super educational. You know, the best way to learn anything is to have fun doing it. Okay, so we the

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Brewsters have a lot of games that were popular in the nineties when my wife and I were teens, you know, Outburst, Taboo, Tribond, Cranium, but honestly no one in the house prefers those games.

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Neither my wife nor I, my kids or the boys in my house. Sometimes I pull them out for variety and you're not a bad person if you like them.

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To be honest, I found from watching my son how valuable the game Taboo is. It helps him to learn to make abstract connections between various concrete ideas.

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It also builds his vocabulary by requiring him to quickly think of synonyms. Real quick though, before I move on, there's this newer game that takes the same skills

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Taboo requires and then it takes it to the next level. If you haven't played Codenames, you need to check it out, man.

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It's a challenge, but it stretches the mind to make new synoptic bridges between ideas and words.

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And that's like bench pressing for a child's mind. It's really good for him. But anyway, my family also loves to play the classic games from time to time.

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We enjoy Monopoly. We use it to teach handling money, basic math, and biblical stewardship concepts.

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Life is also a very similar game. Clue helps with deduction skills and I use Tritigo to teach my kids basic war strategy.

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We also enjoy Othello and chess. Chess is actually a new family favorite. I absolutely love it because there's no randomness.

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There's no chance. Every possible move in peace can be seen. You just have to figure it out. And there are a lot of games like that.

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Blocus is cool. Score 4, Mancala, and Connect 4 are all very similar in that type of a game.

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There's another slice of the gaming world that's built on balance. My family doesn't play these games as often, but games like Jenga and the amazing

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German version kind of game called Villa Poletti are super good for coordination and finesse.

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And I do like using them, especially in conjunction with our martial arts training. Then there's games like Rummikub, Take It Easy, Pirate's Dice, Quirkle, Rakko, Sat Uno, Skip Bow, Dutch Bliss, and nearly every card game, which is a great strategy game that can incorporate elements of chance.

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So it's not pure strategy. It's definitely not pure chance. I'm also a huge fan of word games. Now my kids are a little young to be truly appreciating and also to be successful at a game like Scrabble, but I very much look forward to the day

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I introduce them to Scrabble, Boggle, and Upwards. These games build brainpower as a child has to learn basic strategy, but then they're forced to make momentary changes in their strategy as random elements come into the game.

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And also obviously with the word games helps them to build their understanding of vocabulary and whatnot, which is just so huge in this world and really important for our family talk.

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We also really like Backgammon. This is potentially the world's oldest game and it works off the same principles as the other games

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I've just mentioned. But then there are a whole slew of our favorite games.

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I like to describe, I don't know, I don't really have a good way of describing them, but kind of think of them as simulation games. These games often involve like multiple steps that are designed to create a civilization or a town, economy, or business.

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They require various levels of strategy, psychology, people skills, lots of great stuff.

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Monopoly is a classic version of this type of game, but my family's favorites are the following. We love

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Dominium. It's a card -based game with a ton of add -ons and expansions. The game has super unique elements that makes it unlike most games

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I've ever played. We also really love Carcassonne, Ticket to Ride, Cosmic Encounter, Settlers of Catan, and Alhambra.

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I think my family really loves these games because they're super cerebral. As I already mentioned, they require a different strategy and plans that span various facets of the game.

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But they also have a super important element I discussed in episode 137. On the show,

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I talked about teaching your kids to enjoy doing the right things by helping them see how the action or information can be used to create things.

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Well, these games do just that. In Dominion, you're basically creating a society of cards that all work together.

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Cosmic Encounter is building a civilization of alien beings. Carcassonne, Settlers of Catan, and Alhambra require the player to build villages and cities, and Ticket to Ride is about manufacturing a sprawling system of railroads.

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This element of actually creating something is so important because that's what God created us to do.

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I think the old game, Mouse Trap, is a perfect example of this. I don't know anyone who's ever really played the game, but I do know that almost everyone has built the

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Mouse Trap contraption from time to time. Also in Genesis 2 and 3, God commands mankind to steward and manage the world.

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Games like these teach us many of the skills necessary to have dominion in this world. And yes, that pun was intended.

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So those are just some of my family's favorite games. Some, you ask? Yeah, we have a ton more and there are plenty more games in our cabinets.

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We have Twister and Jumanji, Battleship, Aztec, Resistance. We didn't play Testus at all, which is really just a game just for having fun.

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There's nothing valuable about that game other than having fun and building relationships. And we have a ton more games too.

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If you can't tell, we believe that game playing is extremely important. But before we end today,

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I do want to address one more concern some of you are going to have. Competition.

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Now, we already discussed that we need to win and lose graciously, but our society has been trying to convince us for years that competition in general is bad.

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But is that true? Is it sinful to compete? I have to say no. Here are some biblical observations and principles to support my point.

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First, Paul uses a number of illustrations from competitive sports where he compares himself and us to boxers and runners in the

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Olympic Games. In addition, the Bible frequently compares us to soldiers. If that's not a competition,

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I don't know what is. The point is, competition isn't bad as long as it's done lovingly.

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If it's loving, then it's profitable as it's seeking our greatest good. When I play chess with my son, sometimes

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I play to help him learn to win. Sometimes I play to teach him how to lose. Sometimes we play to practice a tactic or strategy.

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And each of those encounters, even the ones that end with him losing, are designed to help him become more like Christ.

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Please just don't buy the lie that competitive sports and winning and losing are somehow dangerous to children's psyches or self -esteem.

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As I've observed on many occasions, our children need less self -esteem and more

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God -esteem. If that were the case, they would learn to trust the Lord in their losses, but they'd also learn to improve through their losses, making it easier to overcome in the future.

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I don't believe there's any Christ -honoring reason to not play games with your kids. And though this particular episode really wasn't about sports, we can definitely make many of the same applications about basketball and archery, baseball,

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BMX, soccer, skiing, cattle roping, and the panoply of other options in the world of competitive sports.

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Today's episode notes are going to include a variety of goals you can have for your game playing and also a short list of my family's favorites, and I hope you and your kids are able to derive many hours of fun from a new game.

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And please share this episode with your friends, whether they be game players or not. And I know Ray and Carolyn will love this episode.

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They're not only two of our beloved patrons, but they love playing games of all sorts. And please remember, we are a listener -supported ministry.

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If you think the Lord would be glorified by you supporting Truth Loved Parent like Ray and Carolyn do, please click the five ways to support

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TLP link in the description. And also, please join us next time as we tackle a much more significant topic.

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Again, I have to encourage those of you with younger children not to shy away from our next episode. We're going to discuss what to do if you discover your child with pornography, but we're also going to discuss how to parent a young child who inadvertently saw something they weren't supposed to see, perhaps in a movie or on the internet or because of a friend.

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We can't afford to improvise in situations like that. We need to be intentional and premeditated, so I hope that our next episode,

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Help! I Just Found My Child With Porn, will equip you for that unfortunate eventuality. Because it's such a big deal, the topic of pornography is something we discuss quite a bit on social media, specifically our

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Facebook page. Please follow us on Facebook so you'll have access to those articles all in one place.

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And never hesitate to ask our counselors for assistance. You can reach them at counselor at truthlovedparent .com.

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God loves for His children to have fun. He created it and desperately wants you and your children to strengthen your relationships with it.

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In addition, He wants your children to mature and grow in the skills with which He's gifted them. You may as well have fun doing it.

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See you next time! Truth. Love. Parent. is part of the

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Evermind Ministries family and is dedicated to helping you become an intentional, premeditated parent.

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Join us next time as we search God's Word for the truth your family needs today.