Nine-Year-Old Sent to Rehab After Pissing Herself Playing ‘Fortnite’
It’s somewhat sad that the one of the only places doing actual investigative journalism today is a comedy show on HBO. But it was just a few weeks ago that The Pretentious British Daily Show Last Week Tonight With John Oliver had a report on rehab. The main point was that rehab is entirely unregulated and the treatments offered, such as equine therapy, generally have no proven benefits. Also, you might run into Harvey Weinstein.
So it’s probably not the place to send a nine-year-old girl who’s playing too many video games, specifically the free-to-play battle royale game Fortnite. But according to The Mirror, that’s exactly what one couple in the UK did after finding their daughter sitting in a puddle of her own urine in the middle of the night playing Fortnite after they had gone to bed.
Carol said: “We got called in by her head teacher asking if everything was OK. She had fallen asleep twice in lessons and her grades were slipping.
“When we asked our daughter what the problem was, she became unusually argumentative and aggressive, which we just put down to her hormones.”
But soon the sports-mad girl started saying she too tired to go to gym or ballet classes, as well as missing the family visits to church on Sunday mornings.
Noticing small but regular payments on their credit card to Microsoft, adding up to over £50 a month, they asked if she knew anything about this.
The mum said: “Our daughter told us it could be some extras she’d paid for on Fortnite.
“Of course we were furious and confiscated her Xbox. But then she lashed out and hit my husband in the face.”
I already feel like the problem here isn’t Fortnite. Learn to discipline your children. Yes, I know it’s hard after you found out that every child psychologist in the world says spanking is detrimental to children’s development and increases rather than corrects behavioral problems, but children still need rules, structure and discipline and there are proper ways to accomplish that.
The girl’s mum told the Sunday People: “We had no idea, when we let her play the game, of the addictive nature or the impact it could have on her mental health.
“She is in therapy for the addiction after she became withdrawn, agitated and disturbed from playing up to ten hours a day – sometimes playing until dawn, wetting herself so she didn’t have to leave the screen.
“This is a serious issue which is destroying our little girl’s life and someone needs to step in to ban it before it becomes an epidemic.”
Well, no, idiotic British lady, no one needs to ban anything, you just need to take your kid’s Xbox. We’ve gone through this time and time again, and every generation of parents goes “Oh, but the things they have today are totally different than things that my parents thought were ruining society when I was a kid!” The United States had congressional hearings in the 1950’s because someone thought Batman and Robin might be gay. That actually happened.
The British parliament first discussed banning “addictive video games” in 1981, arguing that Space Invaders was addictive and a threat to the health and well-being of children. Sound familiar? You might also remember the freak-outs in the mid-1980s about pen and paper role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons being addictive and satanic. And 10-15 years ago, MMORPGs like World of Warcraft were addictive and were going to destroy lives.
Take the kid’s Xbox if she’s playing too much and making all kinds of micropays for skins or whatever. And if she punches you for trying to take her Xbox, punish her for that. But the problem here isn’t that Fortnite is addictive and destroying society, it’s just that you’re a bad parent. Take a parenting class. There are literally thousands of books on parenting, read one.
