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Comment by jon-wood | Hacker News Reader

On the scale of months and years children are amazing, and I agree it’s fascinating to watch as they develop into their own people.

However, on the scale of hours and days they can be mind-numbingly boring, as anyone who’s played hide and seek with a four year old who repeatedly goes and hides in their bedroom cupboard can probably attest. I love my boy dearly, but I am so, so, bored of playing the first hour of Minecraft now - he loves it though, so every few days we start up a new world, and we mine our way down to some diamonds, at which point he loses interest.

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I don’t think parents were ever meant to play hide and seek with their children for hours on end, but to let them go play with the other 4 year olds and relatives in the village, give them bandaids and hugs when they fall, have them be back by sundown, feed them food and tuck them into bed by 8pm.

But in todays atomized and helicopter parenting with liability world, you can’t do that and thus parenting is a lot more work than it should be.

Damn, maybe I should have kids. I've played the first hour of Civ V over 500 times now and never finished a game.

Sounds like you need to try some Minecraft mods :)

I think Adventure Mode and also the stuff available in Education Edition might make Minecraft a bit more of a long-term prospect there. You can make stuff for your kids to explore or do (either on rails or unguided), and there's quite a decent body of work out there shared in the education space.

I personally love Education Edition for the coding interface, but there is some other neat stuff in there as well.

Mind you, my first daughter is coming up on 2 years old, so there's a ways off until I get there. I'm just speaking as a teacher who uses it. My daughter is fascinating though - it's really interesting watching her figure out skills like sorting, and also discovering all the little ways my wife and I have unconsciously confused her with our use of language, which she then picks up without us realising it.

I cannot remember my parents ever playing hide and seek with me. I don't think adults need to feel that they need to play with children for hours on end. That's incredibly dull. Find your kid a playmate.

Yes. Parenting is fascinating, wonderful, but also exhausting to do it well.

Childhood is long days and short years.

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