Hello @Calaber24p, Great article. As a father of four and a Wow player since vanilla, I would like to say that I have been trying to tell others for many years about how great and actually very educational Wow has been for exactly the reasons you mentioned. I have been one of the luckiest dads in the world imo, to be able to sit side by side my youngest son and play everyday for almost 10 ?years .. he was about 10 when I got us both EQOA (EverQuest Online Adventures) when the Sony PS2's came out. Pretty much the same as Wow, and my son "woke up" and was so badd ass I got 2 more ps2's and set up in living room. (The groups were comprised of 4 players so we POWND all drops) Rockin 4 PS2's w/ 4 (OLDschool large screen tv's took up a whole wall) and played basically 24/7. My son just bloomed talking to people all over the USA and learned so much about life as you mentioned ...(he also didn't tell but a very few his age). after about 2 yrs, Wow came out, so we sold our 2 mains accounts for $3,500.00 and he got his 1st pc ... and we started playing Wow. Before long we were raiding and having the times of our lives ... I want to stress HERE and NOW ... People, you would not believe what it takes to get 40 people to work together for hours and hours ... I am not articulate enough to say how proud I was and still am of all these kids that I watched grow up into great young men & women helping , caring, sharing & loving each other.
I pretty much started 3 of the 4 kids on pc's as soon as they could sit up and control a mouse .... and yes they grew up playing games and yes their IQ's are all way up there.
Wow was a thing in our history that was just at the right time in our history that helped a lot of kids turn into great human beings. Anything you can learn in school was taught at home in games, name it, it is there. With a little direction, NOT dictation, children will BLOOM ! @Calaber24p I am very proud of you and so sorry that I wasn't able to talk to your dad back then ... He missed out on something that he will unfortunately never understand. That chance of bonding usually comes but once a lifetime. I hope that you found other ways to do so.