Kids these days will grow up with shovelware being considered as "good."

I don't feel sorry for them anymore, there's "shit" taste, and then there's just objectively shit taste.

I am seeing a lot of people simply blame parents and the children themselves for children's preference for mobile gaming. Why?

This gen the majority of gamers have been clamoring for big, blockbuster AAA mature games with intricate stories and huge online multiplayer modes, and have been pushing aside and outright bashing a majority of games that don't fit the bill as "kiddie". Pretty much reducing parents to buy what for their kids? Disney Infinity? Skylanders? Who can legitimately look at these games, these wallet-guzzling games, and look back at the games that they played as a kid and say "Yeah these games are as good as the ones from my childhood"?
And with all this going on, of course companies are going to aim for mobile gaming. It might be a bubble that may pop eventually, but look at the safety and profit that comes from aiming at kids in this section of gaming. Its also much more easier for (yes mostly lazy, but other times very busy) parents who don't monitor their children's gaming to have a stronger guarantee they aren't playing something inappropriate for their age and what-not.

Obviously I don't mean us here at Vgchartz in general. I'm just saying with the way gaming has transformed this gen by gamers and the industry in general, a huge part of the blame rolls to us just as much

But mobile games are so trash. I'm old school and brought my PSP and DS wherever I went. Till this day I bring my 2ds to places and play various games. Honestly I don't understand the appeal of mobile games they bore me quick. Yeah you wanna keep yourself occupied going places but still.....

My very first Videogame experience actually was on a computer, playing the very first Might & Magic on a friends Apple (can't remember which model he had, I think it was a Mac LC but don't quote me on that) at age 4. I started gaming on consoles only 4 years later at age 8, and a year later also with handhelds. I also got my first PC at age 6 (a refurbished 286 from the bank my father was working for - still don't know why a PC from a bank came with a Joystickport card), slightly too late for the lowest age group but still before I started console gaming.

This feels like a time travel assassination movie(or real life thing) waiting to happen for anyone not liking the fact mobile games are taking over kids minds instead of traditional handhelds like the Game Boy.

Not necessarly. The sales of PC hardware, which is the number that has been going down, is calculated by the total sum of $ worth. Thing is, if you bought a halfway decent processor with Sandy Bridge (i5/7 2xx0, released January 2011) or later, there has been no need to buy a new CPU yet. Especially the OEM market, which is the bulk of the PC hardware market (most companies use them for their PCs), suffered from this. This also meant that they could forego the expensive top-of-the-line models and choose cheaper ones instead. Graphics cards have also stagnated during that period due to having been limited to the 28nm process for so long. Also, APU/iGPU also mean for OEMs that they don't necessarly sell dedicated graphics cards anymore for standard office PCs, further reducing the financial value of the sales.

Long story short: If one does not need to upgrade or replace the hardware, hardware sales naturally suffer from this. The home PC market is minuscule compared to the OEM market in therms of hardware value and thus it's growth doesn't really weights into the total hardware sales statistics.

Besides, sales went actually up last year for the first time in 7 years (the start of the netbook craze was the reason back then), if not by much and not everywhere, but still up.

it's been like that for a while now, kids wnat their iDevices much more than they want a console (generally, some still want a console).

Bey their very nature a portable device is much more appealing to many kids, they can carry it around, to wherever their parents take them, they can do more than games (my nephew likes making videos!) and there is tons of free games (f2p = no need to beg, they have plenty of time to grind), a lot of it colorful and aimed at them! ... oh and they are less likely to have to compete with their parents/older siblings, etc. for the big TV!

Everybody wins, except console makers...

This might actually be the reason (or at least, one of them) why the consoles are declining. Tell me of an ad from a game from P4/Xbox ONE which wasn't aimed at a more or less mature audience and rated for games younger than 12 and up? I don't know about the US, but I haven't seen such an ad yet here where I live. So of course these kids will get their first gaming experiences on platforms other than those consoles and might as well stick to them. Nintendo gets belittled for it's kid-friendly games, but maybe Sony and Microsoft should have more of them, too?

U bring up some pretty good points, compared to the previous generations there simply aren't nearly as many games aimed at children releasing for dedicated gaming devices. In the 90s/00s it seemed like every Disney/Nickelodeon/Cartoon Network show and every Disney/Pixar/DreamWorks movie had its own game on dedicated gaming devices. It's not that way anymore, basically on current gen devices, kids  have a handful of Lego games, a few Toys to Life games and Minecraft. It shouldn't really be surprising that kids are playing games elsewhere.

Lets see

child wants to play games

parent wants to use tv

cheap chinese android tablets for $50 or less.

a stack of old smart phonse because parent needs to have the latest each year.

connect both to wifi, give to kids they do their thing, and you enjoy your tv without dramas.