I don't understand what you are saying. What would be inconvenient or difficult to admit?
That coloring books "have anything to do with art", despite the fact that they involve filling out the outlines of art made by others-- and skipping the ability to create art of one's own. Why not draw one's own art and color it?
It is an obvious advantage in this discussion for you to try to distance (or as lawyers say, "distinguish") the two. I'm just in essence saying, "I see what you did there". It's completely obvious that coloring in someone else's art has something to do with art, despite the fact that it's imaginationally completely passive instead of involving active creation (that's my point, actually).
I'd say for us coloring pages or coloring books were waiting for the entree to arrive at a restaurant. Maybe three hours a year?
I looked back at the previous discussion on coloring, and see I've partly confused you with PoppaRex, who was much more forceful in advocating coloring, so I'm sorry. I certainly think anything can be overdone, and three hours a year of just about anything would be seen as moderation.
Rules and strategic play have existed for generations before computers. Surely I'm not the only one who remembers childhood play involving endless hours of rule creation and negotiation.
... which isn't the same as playing a strategy game, some of which are on computers today. When they are on computers, they can offer greater richness of detail; but in general playing a strategy game on the computer is no more harmful in terms of curbing creativity than, say, playing a game of chess. And here you're engaging in the same sort of fallacy as before (i.e. "Just because computers didn't exist in the past, yet children existed, there is nothing new and positive about playing on computers today").
Screens aren't the same as play in real life. They don't involve using gross motor skills, feeling the weight of objects, experiencing the size of objects in real space, having the sensory experience of objects, interacting and negotiating with real people - reading their facial expressions, etc.
You're correct, those are actual differences between playing with a simulated environment and playing with real objects and people. The fact that they are different does not mean that computers offer no advantages. A child can practice flying a plane with software today, actually feel what it might feel like to look out of the cockpit (even engage with an enemy aircraft), etc., whereas almost no one ever gets that chance in the real world; that's just an example. I've provided others.
It is odd to me to try to parse it out this way. My experience of kid play both as a parent and as a child is that it involved all of these - imagination, strategy, problem solving, conflict, cooperation, creativity. It is all there in kid play at least in kids who know how to play - something that is disappearing for some kids with more screens.
Playing a game on a computer, or playing with a software model, doesn't rule out non-computer-based play, and offers things that non-computer-based play does not. And you still haven't explained how playing a computer strategy game stunts creativity any more than playing a game of chess-- would it be ruling out the ability to imagine a knight actually forking a king and queen at once?
I don't think the research suggests that most kids are on screens three hours a year, more like what five or six hours a day... Of course we know that the real issue is that for most kids it isn't a very rare experience but hours and hours each week.
I don't personally let my kids on the computer that much. In fact, they didn't use them at all today. I agree that the main issue is that computers are seductive and can be passivating in the extreme, and so unchecked computer use could be bad for kids. I don't see that all computer play unavoidably is bad for children's imagination. I also don't think you've managed to distinguish playing a computer strategy game from playing a board game, etc.
I'm with you more on the video time. I do sometimes worry about the amount of screen time we allow the kids there, and have cut back on TV to the point that they are usually allowed one PBS show in the morning while getting ready for school. I continue to let them watch movies, but I'd probably cut that way back if, say, DS6's reading was flagging (it's increasing). With DS2 some of the screen time has actually helped him, for example early on I showed him "Baby Babble" DVDs to help get him vocalizing more (they worked) and the Leapfrog Letter Factory seems to have helped him memorize his letter facts better even than Starfall and reading.
