My kids are now 20 somethings, but I recall the years we had no TV in the house, and how we agonized over whether Mario was going to rot our son’s brain (it seems that it did *not* harm him.) Pogue’s dilemma seems more difficult, as the electronic apps he describes are not passive, and the kid, even if he is 6, is creating, not just passively viewing.

I remember kids who grew up in the projects when I taught in Uptown. They weren’t allowed to go outside much, and their parents worked long hours, so they spent time watching lots of TV, and they were living way up off the ground so what they looked at all day did not give their eyes/brains/percepetion systems much variety — lots of 2D, far away things.

Many of these kids had trouble learning to read. But they also couldn’t dribble a ball (these were kids 9-10 years old.) Reading specialists discuss how not reading is often associated with not being able to ride a bike, bounce a ball — that hand to eye and perception issues come into the reading process.

So, though the intellectual and thinking part of the iPad games sounds fine, I wonder if the kids don’t need to move their eyes and the rest of themselves outside and up and down and be active in the real world, before we let them settle into the virtual world.

Come on, how can apps like that be bad for a kid? Is it really that much different from playing with paper cutouts? Or blocks? Or a toy drum set?

When he does play games, he favors thinking games like Cut the Rope (a clever physics-based puzzle game) or Rush Hour (strategy puzzles). Heck, even Angry Birds involves some thinking. You have to plan ahead and calculate and use resources wisely.

In the old days, we used to tut-tut about how much TV kids watched — but parents usually made an exception for educational shows like “Sesame Street” and “Between the Lions.” How is this any different? Shouldn’t we make exceptions for creative and problem-solving apps?

via A Parent’s Struggle With a Child’s iPad Addiction – NYTimes.com.