{"id":590,"date":"2011-10-20T11:07:27","date_gmt":"2011-10-20T15:07:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/dadequate\/?p=590"},"modified":"2011-10-20T11:10:45","modified_gmt":"2011-10-20T15:10:45","slug":"parentocracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dadequate\/2011\/10\/parentocracy.html","title":{"rendered":"Parentocracy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday I had the privilege<\/strong> of getting to guest-post at Don Miller’s blog<\/a>. It was dad-related, so I’ll re-post it here. (Thanks, Don and Jordan!)<\/p>\n

———-<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>There\u2019s a hot new website<\/strong> \u2014 they still make those, you know \u2014 called Fitocracy<\/a>. It\u2019s a site for tracking your day-to-day fitness achievements. How many push-ups did you do? How fast did you run that 5K? How long were you on the elliptical? <\/em>You log in your workouts, it assigns points based on your exercises\u2019 degree of difficulty, and you watch the points accumulate. Once you reach a certain number of points, you move up a level. You unlock achievement badges. And because it\u2019s as much a social media site as anything else, your friends and followers get to see how well (or poorly) you\u2019re doing.<\/p>\n

The guys who started it, Brian Wang and Richard Talens<\/a>, grew up playing video games. They knew how addictive gaming could be. What if the pleasures of gaming \u2014 new levels, new achievements, a flurry of points \u2014 could be applied to exercise? After all, exercise isn\u2019t always fun. You don\u2019t always see immediate changes in your body. There are no power-up noises that ding when you meet a goal. In an activity where \u201creal\u201d results are hard to see, Fitocracy creates them and gives them to you as soon as you log a workout. It\u2019s pretty brilliant.<\/p>\n

So brilliant, in fact, that I keep trying to think of other hard-to-quantify activities that could benefit from the same approach. Sure, we need to be healthier. But what else could we improve? I write a blog about fatherhood<\/a>. What if we could inject the immediate returns of gaming into the long-haul experience of being a good dad?
\n
\nLog your activities, dads:<\/strong><\/p>\n

+100 points for jumping on the trampoline with your kids<\/p>\n

+200 points for playing Barbies with your daughter, even if you have no idea what you\u2019re supposed to do or say<\/p>\n

+175 points for participating in a living-room dance party (50 bonus points if the music is by The Wiggles)<\/p>\n

+150 points for each story you tell at night before bed (add 50 if you made up the story yourself)<\/p>\n

+75 points for each game of H-O-R-S-E you play in the driveway (add 50 if you purposefully lose)<\/p>\n

+25 points per diaper changed, bottle given, and post-feeding burp achieved<\/p>\n

+10 per high five or fist bump given<\/p>\n

+500 points for talking to your kid about sex before he figures it out from his friends<\/p>\n

+500 points for coaching your kid\u2019s sports team<\/p>\n

+500 points every time one of your kids is kind to someone else because he\u2019s seen you treat people that way<\/p>\n

Those points could add up.<\/strong> You\u2019d see average fathers unlocking achievements \u2014 Super Dad, Not-Entirely-Lame Dad, Sporty Dad <\/em>\u2013 on a weekly basis. We\u2019ll call it \u201cParentocracy\u201d and get moms involved, too. (They would earn points so fast they\u2019d need special secret levels.)<\/p>\n

Could Parentocracy be a way to get dads home from work faster, or off their recliners, or away from their smartphones? Could it be a way to make them more active and present in their kids\u2019 lives?<\/p>\n

The sad thing is: probably so. Sometimes you have to dangle a few carrots in front of us to get us to do the right thing. (As if our kids\u2019 futures aren\u2019t enough carrot already.)<\/p>\n

So there\u2019s the idea, Internet geniuses and coding nerds. Get to work.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday I had the privilege of getting to guest-post at Don Miller’s blog. It was dad-related, so I’ll re-post it here. (Thanks, Don and Jordan!) ———- There\u2019s a hot new website \u2014 they still make those, you know \u2014 called Fitocracy. It\u2019s a site for tracking your day-to-day fitness achievements. How many push-ups did you…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":84,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[89,20],"tags":[383,381,382,384],"class_list":["post-590","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-inspiration","category-linked","tag-brian-wang","tag-don-miller","tag-fitocracy","tag-richard-talens"],"yoast_head":"\nParentocracy - Dadequate<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dadequate\/2011\/10\/parentocracy.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Parentocracy - Dadequate\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Yesterday I had the privilege of getting to guest-post at Don Miller’s blog. It was dad-related, so I’ll re-post it here. (Thanks, Don and Jordan!) ———- There\u2019s a hot new website \u2014 they still make those, you know \u2014 called Fitocracy. It\u2019s a site for tracking your day-to-day fitness achievements. 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