Why my son will finally play Brawl Stars after all

In a recent article I talked about why we decided not to let our oldest son (9 years old) play Brawl Stars. This article is an update, and it might surprise you to hear that in the end we're going to let him play.

The reason is that today he came to us, crying, telling us that for a while now the other kids have been bullying him because he's the only one who can't play Brawl Stars, and that this has also left him isolated in other ways. His friends backed this up, giving us more details when they saw how crushed he was. I think the readers who are mothers or fathers will quickly empathize with the feeling of watching a child cry inconsolably over something that's tearing them up. In fact, it's quite likely his perception is a bit exaggerated, but there's no point dwelling on that either — it's his perception. You can maybe question the truth of the facts, but you can't question the emotions.

So we'll let him play and we'll try to rebuild his self-esteem, and we'll set aside our misgivings so he can see we're on his side. But we're left with that rotten aftertaste of seeing that it's precisely the attitudes we didn't want to encourage within the game that, in the real world, have forced us to make this decision.