Dave ‘Hughesy’ Hughes was a guest on the Carrie & Tommy Show on Wednesday, where he posed the question, “Australia, should a nine-year-old be allowed to play Fortnite?’
Carrie Bickmore had a lot to say on the matter, and none of it was good.
Hughesy and Kate Langbroek joined Carrie Bickmore and her co-host Tommy Little on air where the chat turned to whether or not Fortnite was a good idea for Hughesy’s nine-year-old son, Rafferty.
Hughesy’s wife, Holly had previously asked him to research whether or not it was appropriate, and he admitted that he got a third of the way through one review before the dad-of-three caved, deciding that it would be fine.
Carrie Bickmore was quick to caution him that he’d be best to avoid it, after her own experiences with her son, 11-year-old Ollie.
Fortnite is the multi-gamer phenomenon that has taken the world by storm since its arrival in 2015. It’s a survival game, where the players collect resources, make tools and weapons, and try to stay alive as long as possible.
Highly addictive, the game has parents divided on whether or not their children should ever get involved, and Carrie is firmly in the camp of staying away if you can.
“Ollie’s just turned 11, he was playing at ten and I was the last of the parents to let him play,’ the heavily pregnant star admitted.
“I felt like I had no choice,” Carrie confessed, lamenting that she gave in and realising that she didn’t have to after bumping into another school mum who refused to even have iPads in her home.
“Her kid’s not on Fortnite and he’s the coolest most awesome kid and I was like, ‘Why did I give in?’ I didn’t need to, there was a perfect example of someone who lives their life fine without Fortnite in it.”
“It has affected Ollie in a way that no other video game has,”
When Tommy warned her that she might want to stay the “fun mum”, not the “boring mum” Carrie went into more detail about why she wished she never agreed to have Fortnite in their home cautioning Hughesy to not let Rafferty begin if he hadn’t already.
“I mean this quite genuinely, don’t let him play,” Carrie warned. “I’ll tell you why, because it has affected Ollie in a way that no other video game has affected him.”
Carrie blamed the fact that Fortnite can’t be paused for being part of the problem, even for her son who is ‘normally a good kid’.
“You can’t pause it, so you’re literally asking them whenever you need them to do something to stop, mid-game when they’re in the middle of something with people that they’re friends with, right?” she explains.
“So they get so agitated. Even he admitted to me that this game makes him more anxious than any game he has ever played.”
Carrie has introduced board games at home to replace Fortnite and has found that it’s working. Ollie and his friends will play them instead of Fortnite.
“I gave him Yahtzee the other day, people. Blew his mind, so fun,” Carrie laughed.
Kate Langbroek joined the conversation to support Carrie, saying it was perhaps parent-guilt that made them give in to letting our kids play games that they were not sure about.
“The Dutch have a saying, ‘A child’s hand is easily filled’, and we put too much in our children’s hands,” she said.
“Because we try to make up for the fact we’re working, we’re busy and we do that so that we’ve got money so we can buy them sh@t. They don’t want sh@t.”
