Re: [Slightly OT] Philosophy (was Re: Replacement for Abiword: LyX? Openoffice?)
On Tue, Oct 21, 2003 at 04:13:49PM -0500, Ron Johnson wrote:
> Why expose children to computers at such a young age? Shouldn't
> they be running and jumping, playing with toys, coloring, cutting,
> riding bike/scooter, etc, instead?
You talk about that as if "exposing" should be a carefully controlled thing.
I neither "expose" nor "shield" my 2 year-old from computers. They are
simply there, begging to be interacted with: by banging on the keyboard,
playing with the monitor controls, and rebooting them regularly. ;)
With my 2-year-old, all I really want to do is take her natural urge to
explore her environment and guide it gently in areas that I think she'd
enjoy. That's the same impetus for "exposing" all of my children to
computers.
And why should any of that be to the exclusion of running, jumping, or any
of the other things you mentioned? All of the children do those things
without any prompting at all, and we give them plenty of opportunities to
develop in those ways.
> Yes, I have 2 young children: boy aged 5.67, girl aged 4.25, and
> yes, I am a database administrator (after being a programmer for
> many years), and I've been very successful at it, while not having
> been exposed to computers until 12th grade. (Although I could have
> used WordStar to type book reports & term papers.)
I have five children, all of whom use the computer in varying degrees, and
all of whom discovered them early in life. I, too, have a background in
computers, but I came to it much earlier in life: at around age 8. I don't
think the early exposure has warped me, but then again, maybe it has, and
I'm just too warped to realize it. :)
If it were a matter of deciding whether to *push* computers on children at
an early age or not, I would see your point. But they are such a part of
life now that I would have to actively *shield* my children from them to
avoid this "exposure" that you seem to think is detrimental to their
development. I'm not willing to do that, nor do I really see the point. So
long as everything is kept in proper balance (just as I wouldn't feed your
2-year-old a diet of junk food, neither do I plunk the kids in front of the
computer for hours at a time) using computers at an early age can be a fun
and constructive part of their growing up, without taking away from all of
the other more classically "kid" things that kids do.
Ben
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