Barack Obama: Parents should clamp down on games

US senator and Presidential hopeful Barack Obama has told American parents that they need to curb the amount of time their kids spend playing video games.

Obama, 46, told a packed Wilkes Hall in Pennsylvania, US to turn off the television, turn off the video games”, adding that "Government can’t do everything".

According to Pennsylvania’s Patriot News, Obama is backing a radical new policy, which would see parents identified as ‘at-risk’ at the hospital when they deliver a baby – and would then be taught to read and encouraged to push their child through a good education.

It’s not the first time Obama has attacked US kids’ overexposure to video games. Back in February he told a Wisconsin crowd:

We’re going to have to parent better, and turn off the television set, and put the video games away, and instil a sense of excellence in our children, and that’s going to take some time.”

Indeed, Gamepolitics quotes Obama criticising parents for over-exposing their kids to games from as far back as April, 2006.