Not Yet. Part I

I had two interesting conversations with family members over the last few days. I’ll call the conversations interesting and politely refrain from calling them disturbing because I, like many new parents, have yet to struggle with how much and how often my kids are exposed to video games. I fear these days are coming sooner than I want them to and abhor the thought that I’ll probably give in to my son or daughter’s wishes to own and master the same shoot ‘em up / stab ‘em in the back type of video games I detest once they are mainstreamed into the local school system. But for now, I’m thankful that I can take the less trodden high road and in a loud whisper strike out against all forms of interactive video learning and games designed with luring children and young adults into the world of video gaming.

The first conversation I had centered on introducing my daughter to video learning games from websites like Sesame Street and BigFishGames. The second conversation also had to do with computers, but the emphasis of our talk focused on how proud the family member was at how long his / her child could sit and stare at a computer screen for hours upon hours playing a variety of games; and how he / she could “look up” all kinds of information on the Internet.

I’ve been fortunate to have my first child, a girl, take to being read to. Taylor loves books. One of her first words was “book.” From books, I feel, her vocabulary, among other things, has continually flourished from an early age. Simon, on the other hand, much to my distress at the time, would not sit still and be read to until he was about thirteen months old. Ironically, his useful vocabulary, when compared to his sister’s, lagged far behind hers at the same age. It was not until he accepted being read to that he started to speak; and now it seems like he is picking up a new word everyday. I would gander to say that he has learned more new words in the last two weeks than he’s know in the last fourteen months. It’s an amazing phenomenon to watch unfold!

With this first-hand, early and later book-loving empirical research staring me in the face I do not think it’s outlandish for me to deduce that the more that kids are exposed to reading the better their vocabulary will be. The better one’s vocabulary, as we all know, the easier it is for him or her to communicate. The easier it is for one to communicate the better one’s social skills will probably be. The better one’s social skills are the more desirable other people will find them, and on and on and on. Bottom line, I think it’s better that I spend my time reading to my children rather than showing them how to push buttons on my laptop and then praising them when they push those buttons, so that a computerized voice can tell them they, in fact, did push the correct button.

To be continued….