A Parent’s Struggle With a Child’s iPad Addiction, article by David Pogue.
Personally, so long as the kid gets his exercise and has a social life, I don't see any reason to take away his iPad. Plenty of adults, myself included, would nigh kill somebody who tried to do that to them.
The equivalent when I was a kid would have been to deny me the right to read books except in weekends. I would not have stood up for that, I'd have found a way to read on the sly, or I'd have revolted violently, despite me being a quiet and polite kid.
It is astounding how easily toddlers take to the iPad. For example, from a comment to David's article:
We struggle with the same thing for my 2year old. She loves the iPad, and affectionately calls it the APPLE BOOK, since she can say those 2 words but not iPad. In the beginning when she was about 1, it was merely digital books like Jingle the husky pup, Peter Rabbit or the awesome Toy Story book apps. As you grew older, she learned to flip the pages and even unlock the iPad, so she starting playing memory games, puzzles and animal sound discovery games.
We hear it again and again: 2-4 year olds just figure out how to use the durn thing, all on their own. Huh.
Sure, moderation in all things, couldn't agree more, kids need to do other things too. But apart from that, I think that in the future as software matures, the iPad will turn out to be inestimably important in children's development.
3 comments:
Man! What an AMAZING tool to have had to learn to read and...to "entice" a child to explore, further, when I was a kid! I would probably have struggled to keep it charged and...dry, though! lol! (I used to hang out in a creek reading! Ziplocs weren't invented, yet! :-D
I work with kids, and I have to comment, kids get almost no exercise these days. They go home to their electronic devices. Very very few are outside playing anymore.
Oh, and they don't use these to read, they play games on them mostly. When we have share time where kids tell what they did on, say, Christmas vacation, every last one of them tells of the games they got as presents, and how they spent their time on games. Other kids nod, cool, cool. I just remember skiing, building snowforts, stuff like that.
I admit, the iPad apps. are very cool. Just want to add the balance.
Yah, that might be tricky.
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