If ever there were a case not only for the road trip, not only for the minivan, but for the road trip in the minivan with the built-in entertainment system, this is it: the vast increase in video gaming by children is being blamed for the decrease in attendance at national parks. Except I'm not buying it.
Come. ON. As if you can't get a freakin' PSP or Nintendo DS and just take it along, if your vehicle isn't set up with a video screen that lets you hook up your regular video game console so the kids can rock the joystick from the second or third row. As if any parent worth his or her salt would say "Oh, sure, we'll stay
home and let you play Guitar Hero instead of going to Yellowstone". As if the majority of adults have suddenly decided to stop parenting up. I'm sorry, I know some parents, and I'm not buying it.
What I'm more likely to buy is that we live in a country without any sort of mandated leisure time and where families are often scattered to the four winds, so Americans are often disinclined to waste their precious and hard-earned vacation time going to look at a hole in the ground that's been there for a billion years and isn't going anywhere soon, when they could spend that time visiting family in places that don't happen to be national parks. I'm more likely to suggest that airfare is expensive, and hopping in the car to drive to a national park isn't always feasible either once you figure in the cost of gas and lodging (and the article does note the high cost of travel as another factor). I'm thinking the kind of parent who'd allow their children's busy video gaming schedule to dictate the family's summer plans are probably the kind of parent who aren't trying to organize a trip to Mammoth Cave anyway.
(via Gaming Today)
