3 Healthy Alternatives to Pokémon GO

Unless you’re an isolated hippie living in a forest, or someone who completely eschews technology and lives off-grid with a landline phone (do they even make those anymore?), you have no doubt heard of the Pokémon GO craze sweeping the world. Pokémon GO is a free, location-based reality game for iOS and Android devices in which players use a mobile device’s GPS to locate, capture, battle, and train tiny virtual creatures called Pokemon, who, thanks to the wonders of technology, appear on the screen as if they were in the same real-world location as the player.

I realized the extreme viral nature of this craze when I went for a bike ride on my local trail last week and discovered what had previously been a relatively forsaken fitness trail suddenly overtaken by random students, children, old men, families, and what seemed to be the entire population of the city walking around with their faces buried in a phone, oblivious to runners and cyclists on the trail. As you can imagine, I was simultaneously intrigued and annoyed.

And of course, I’ve been repeatedly asked the question, “Do your kids play Pokémon GO”? In this episode, you’ll discover the answer, and get five healthy alternatives to Pokémon GO:

Is Pokémon GO Healthy?

I was recently reading the Salon.com article The dangers of Pokémon Go: Kids’ brains are vulnerable to virtual and augmented reality, which reported on how researchers conducted three separate studies with over 1,600 video gamers and found that many showed strange post-game hallucinogenic-like effects: hearing or seeing aspects of the game hours or days after they had stopped playing, including sound effects, music and characters voices, explosions, sword swipes and screams. One gamer reported hearing someone from the game whispering “death” for several days after they had stopped playing while another reported seeing images from the game randomly pop up in front of their eyes.

The author of the article goes on to report that children who play Minecraft (another viral smartphone game) report seeing the real world in the cube shapes prevalent in Minecraft, and young video gamers who have blurred reality with that of their game, including one teenager who had to be hospitalized for a month after suffering a version of psychosis following many days of playing another popular game called World of Warcraft.

The author also describes how researchers at Tel Aviv University have published reports and cases of something called “Internet-related psychosis,” in which constant screen immersion produces “psychotic phenomena."

In my opinion, for young children who are still attempting to differentiate between the virtual and the real world, between what is a pixel and what is a true atomic element of life, this can be quite a dangerous phenomenon indeed.

So while my kids do occasionally use my phone to play around with Snapchat, send Grandma text messages, and take photos of cool plants and bugs they’ve found outside, they haven’t been caught up in the Pokémon GO craze—not because I’ve “forbidden” them from it or been a helicopter parent—but simply because I’ve provided them with healthy alternatives that they seem to thoroughly enjoy. Here are five of those healthy alternatives to Pokemon GO, which my own children partake in nearly every day.

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3 Healthy Alternatives to Pokemon GO

1. Fitness Exploring

I’ve been fitness exploring with my kids since they were two. It’s extremely simple, and just a version of the popular “Parkour” style of doing tricks and fitness challenges as you walk through a nature or urban setting. During a one to three mile walk, my kids and/or I will jump up on park benches, balance on beams, climb up walls, climb down walls, crawl through bushes, carry rocks, carry each other, jump, skip, hop, lunge, simulate animal movements such as backward bear crawls and gorilla walks and do just any movement we can imagine, often with a “Follow The Leader” style format. For more on this, look up my friend Darryl Edwards, the official Fitness Explorer.

2. Wild Plant Foraging

Just the other day, I posted to my Instagram page a photo of a lovely, fresh salad prepared in our kitchen, with the caption, “This evening, the boys and I went out to the forest behind our house and harvested wild plants for a salad. We brought home nettle, wild mint and plantain, then we dressed it with avocado oil, raw honey, goat cheese, peaches, slivered almonds, sea salt and black pepper. Perfect pairing for fish. Bon appetit!” Both my children and I use a phone app called “FlowerChecker” to take photographs of plants, roots, mushrooms and other items we find in nature. On the other end of the app is a team of live botanists who help us to identify the edible and medicinal nature of the plant, and figure out what to do with it. Not only is this a fantastic way to learn about nature, but you don’t have to “live in the sticks” to engage in this activity—instead you’d be incredibly surprised at how much wilderness is present in the  grass growing along the sidewalk or in a park in even the most urban of settings.

3. Battles

I do not endorse an infatuation or encouragement of extreme violence in children, especially the type of violence seen in many popular video games, but I do like the idea of a bit of friendly competition every now and again. So, in our garage closet, you’ll find an assortment of paintball guns, soft Nerf weapons like bow and arrow, water guns, water balloons, capture the flag equipment, kickballs for dodgeball and other items we can use to venture outside for a bit of friendly competition that is easily as fun (and far more active) than a video game—and, perhaps more importantly based on the research you learned about earlier, 100% non-pixilated. If you don’t like the idea of your kids running around with waterguns and Nerf bows, try dartboards, miniature tennis nets, ping pong, or just about anything else you’ll find in your local sporting goods store, which, by the way, makes for a perfect field trip for a bunch of bored kids.

So that’s it. I’m not arguing that Pokémon GO is evil, unnecessary, or clinically proven in long term research studies to be unhealthy. But I am indeed proposing that there may be safe and healthy alternatives that do you or your child a greater good than chasing a virtual cartoon character with head down, buried in a phone.

And finally, as I describe in “Can Kids Exercise Too Much?”, there is indeed a law of diminishing returns when it comes to hormone depletion and bone density if kids are constantly running miles and miles or spending their entire day pumping iron at the gym, but from what I’ve observed, this isn’t a huge problem for most families and if it is for your family, then … go read that article.

If you have questions, comments or feedback about these three alternatives to Pokemon GO, you can join the conversation at http://.Facebook.com/getfitguy!

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.