Sunday, July 04, 2010

Kind of Sad

Actually, really quite sad.

I suppose if you want your toddler to have an iPod touch, then you should give them one-without trying to justify it as an educational tool.

If you're looking for an educational tool that helps children pass the time in a car, or waiting room-try a book. No, no-not one of the fancy Kindle things-you know, paper and print with some sort of binding. Really portable things, books are, particularly the paperback editions.

And now for the obligatory utterance:

Get Offa My Lawn!

4 comments:

Jenn said...

I couldn't read more then the first couple of sentence-paragraphs in that article. How do you find this crap, and why do you keep punishing yourself by reading more?

People think that I am causing my children great harm because the most high tech thing we have in our house is the tv. The girls aren't allowed to touch the computer, and we haven't got any video game systems. If they get bored, I give them books, crayons and puzzles. Cruel cruel.

Goody said...

You know, we moved here to escape that sort of thing. If it is this bad in Nebraska, we're kind of doomed.

A few months ago, the 911 system on the land-line network went out, so
i had to show Danny how to use the mobile, in case of an emergency. He was interested to learn, but once the phone was restored, never asked about it again. I suppose it helps that he never sees me using it-the thing stays in my handbag for emergencies. I certainly wouldn't buy him one of his own-children around here all have mobile phones.

Sometimes I wonder if all this ADD stuff is from looking at screens all the time.

Goody said...

Honestly though, we're older than most of the mothers in the article. If I were in my twenties (with three kids already-yikes!) I would have grown-up with a different attitude to technology.

The only technology we had in my house as a kid was a short-wave radio, which was entertaining, but probably didn't do much damage to my attention span. I remember when my dad bought one of those adding machines with the roll of tape. We were like, "Whoa man, you punch in the numbers and it adds them up?! Dude, that's the modern world right there!"

Jenn said...

I was deeply deprived as a child. We had a tv with three stations, one of them french. We didn't get cable tv until I was about 16 and a friend of my Dad's gave us a subscription for Christmas. My Dad didn't even get a touch tone telephone until he had to so he could check his messages at work, my friends loved to come over to see our crazy rotary phones.

I remember those adding machines too...my grandparents had one (Grandfather was a banker), and it was the best toy *ever*.