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Re:IPad: the perfect computing device for children? by bodski on Sunday September 05, 2010 @11:56AM (#1664679)
The thing is... these devices are quite hypnotic and addictive for fully grown adults, let alone infants.

As a father of two young children, I kept them away from computers and screens as much as possible until they were 3 years old.

Babies are wired to be learning about and interacting with their physical environment and the lifeforms around them. Exposing them to highly artificial and abstract phenomena before they have developed the abstract thought processes to assign relevance and meaning to them seems to be at best at waste of hard earned neural circuitry, at worst developmentally damaging.

We need to be gently nurturing our children's imaginations not flattening it and rendering it obsolete via technology. There's plenty of time for kids to discover computers, but once they do other all the other things they love doing will have some serious competition for their attention.

Re:IPad: the perfect computing device for children? by erikstarck on Sunday September 05, 2010 @12:02PM (#1664685)
"Exposing them to highly artificial and abstract phenomena"

...you mean stuff like stuff human speech, maths and other modern inventions?

Re:IPad: the perfect computing device for children? by gigajeff on Monday September 06, 2010 @10:06AM (#1666683)
Sorry but I'm with the other luddites here. I don't encourage iDevice usage with my small (2 and 4) kids. I prefer them using old-fashioned machinery (books, sticks, rocks, dirt, toy trains)