The Changelog

Today on Slashdot, there is a story and interesting discussion about an article entitled Consumer electronics ate my child's imagination.

The main point of the article is that children today are spending a lot of time in front of the TV and playing videogames. As a result, they are less able to reason about the world, and even have a higher rate of depression. Apparently children today average about 2-3 years behind children from just 15 years ago on cognitive tests.

The Slashdot discussion was (surprise!) interesting as well. One point raised was that the entire notion of childhood is fairly modern concept since most children had to work as soon as they were able up until modern times.

This is something that Terah and I have been thinking about already. Terah was shopping for high chairs one day, and was reading reviews online at Amazon. We were both shocked that some chairs were being panned in the reviews because children "got uncomfortable after more than 2 or 3 hours in the chair". Huh?? After reading some more reviews, it seems that people are using high chairs as a place to just plonk down kids for a few hours while the parents are trying to get work done around the house. I can't imagine any high chair being a good place to put a kid for hours. Some parents also complained that the kids could get out of the chair if left unattended for awhile (which brings up a whole LOT of questions).

Then of course, there are plenty of parents that use the TV (or PlayStation or handheld videogames) as a cheap babysitter.

Terah and I have talked about this already, and though we don't have any sort of detailed parenting plan, we certainly do NOT want to be that kind of parents. Some people react by saying, "oh sure, you may say that now, but once you have the kids, you'll change your tune." Yes, that's right, some parents don't even try, and what's more, believe that it's impossible to treat children any other way.

We know plenty of parents that are successfully raising children without buying them hundreds of beeping electronic toys, using the TV (or high chair) as a babysitter, etc. We know it's possible and that's what we're going to aim for, too.