And I admit ... I even OFFER DS4.5 computer time because it's the only time when I might get some quiet around here and hear my own thoughts! lol
Plus both my kids are the type that like to learn on their own. They would never let me explain anything to them. But they absorb a huge amount of info from their show and games. There's no way DS3 would be reading now if it wasn't for Leapfrog videos and Super Why and Wordworld. He does not like being read to so he'd have minimum exposure to reading if it wasn't for those shows. Yet thanks to them he started phonetically reading and wasn't even 2.5 years old. Same for DS4.5. He sure wouldn't know how to do basic addition and subtraction at age of 3 if it wasn't for his V.Smile gaming system because at that age it would never occur to me that he'd have the ability to learn that and I'd wait with any of that till school years later.
And just the fact that he has all this at his fingertips doesn't increase his screen time at all. The laptop in his room, if he wanted to could run all day but he only uses it for about an hour if at all in the afternoon and sometimes in the morning when he wakes up too early.
The only limitation we're imposing (unofficially) is no TV in his room.
Haha. I'd forgotten until I read your post, but my youngest - who was later diagnosed with dyslexia, dysgraphia, and a few other things, hated books, coloring, writing ... But he forced himself to read in order to learn what to do on the screens in Pokemon in his GameBoy.
My kids' favorite game as they got older were the Nancy Drew Mysteries. Even now, with two of them in college and the youngest 13, they'll buy a new game over Thanksgiving or Christmas when they're all together and spend hours upon hours working together to solve the clues.
But I do have to say that up until my older son started college and got into Eve, I never had to worry about addictive behavior. And for a kid that old, it took natural consequences of failing in classes at school to bring about some self-moderation. If I had a child who showed serious addictive behaviors or huge emotional upset, I'd likely have removed or limited the activity with an explanation of why and then let them work their way back to getting some access. So my advice about not limiting is because I didn't need to,
