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I just went and checked out starfall... I don't think my son would get much out of it... it's not a very target-rich environment, there's usually only one thing you can do on a page, so it doesn't seem responsive enough. Also, it wasn't very compelling. Minimal sound, really slow progress.

So... yeah, I don't think that site's very much better that TV at all. But probably still better.

Mr W loved the ABC section on Starfall from 10-14 mos. He would make me drive for hours on it. He got to where he could match the matrix sections. At about 18 months he was bored with it.

We then got him the leapfrog DVDs and he watched the letter factory a lot. The word factory did not catch his interest until about a month ago.

At 24 mos, likes the "learning to read" section now on starfall. The silent E parts make him break into hysterical laughter. The word factory leapfrog DVD he loves as well.

12-18 months was a challenging age for us.

I tried to interest DS(now 2.7) in TV or videos about then because after hours and hours of high demand parenting I was hoping for a break. He would just walk over and turn it off and go find another book for me to read. The guilt of that ! I felt like I was a drug pusher.

Now at 2.7 his favorite TV is the BBC documentary Walking With Dinosaurs, he watches probably 45 min of it a day starting about 9pm. He wants to watch that instead of other options like Clifford. He loved Starfall when he was younger, spending nearly an hour a day total on there (starting somewhere in the 16-19 month range), but finished with it by around 2.3 once he'd learned to read. He does still love his Zac and Peg characters (they sell them on the website, stuffed toys), he just makes them act out his own stories now. He'll play on starfall if I suggest it but it's not something he thinks of to do. Seems like these things run their course.

I can't see the harm in 15 minutes of Starfall or even a half hour of TV at a year old. Not of course for kids that are calmly staring at a wall -- where I live I seem to meet a lot of infants and toddlers who are quite content to sit and stare at hardly anything, and in that situation TV or it's more interactive cousin computer websites seem like they would just make it easy to ignore the child for longer. But for kids that sleep less and do far more per minute already than other kids a little bit of computer games or TV seems harmless.

Polly

Ok, so I tried letting DS play around on starfall just to see, and he did seem interested, and he did seem engaged rather than zoned out. So I may be misjudging the thing. But it really did feel like TV to me, even if I/we were controlling the speed a bit.

Meh, what do I know?

I may try it again on another day and see if it was just a fluke/new experience kinda thing.

I was really tired this morning (I pulled an alnighter for school... blech), and it certainly did give me a break!

I like you guys. You keep the juices flowing an auful lot more than the folks in my April babies group. (NO, we're not going to sleep train. REALLY. No. )

I am sometime guilty of using starfall as DS14mo babysitter when I am burnout, but I try to limit that to less than once a week.

I hear you about sick of reading the same book over and over again. That�s why I buy new books for DS to keep me from getting bored.

We try the following, and they seem to entertain DS for a little while:
- �help� us empty the dryer and put laundry away
- give things between DH and I
- putting lego blocks together
- �mop� the floor
- puzzles (but we have to do it with him)

I personally like more structured plays, so I know what to expect next and don�t burn me out as quickly as ad hoc plays.

P.S. DS likes to read multiple books at the same time as well, but I don't let him switch between books. IMO, I want him to finish what he started. Just my 2 cents.

I'm another in the camp that anything's OK in moderation, if it doesn't interfere with other important life skills. When I was home with DS6, he was a very high-needs infant and toddler, who also did not like to nap. I'm all for finding things that can provide a break for mom. I can't remember exactly what age he used the computer (I'm sure I could search this site and find something!), but I would somewhere between 1 and 2, he wanted to use the keyboard. I opened a blank screen on Word, and let him go. We called it the smiley-face game (I showed him how a colon and paren made a smiley-face.) Sometimes I'd switch the font to wingdings, and he loved that. I've always had a rollerball (stationary) mouse, which DS could easily use at a young age by using one hand to roll and the other to click.

At 18 months, DS's grandma got him a leapfrog count and learn math desk, which he loved. He learned his numbers 1-20, and some basic counting stuff, and played with that quite a bit.

I think between 2-3, DS was pretty independent with the computer. We saved pbs and nick jr and other kid sites to his favorites. We got him some education pre-K/K software, and he loved that for awhile.

Your comment about the repeating of pages of books makes me thing that your little one is starting to crack the reading code. I remember the reading-the-same-book-over-and-over-stage.

We found the computer almost a necessity for DD when she was around 18 months because she was a child who didn't nap and was always bringing us books after books to read to her. I didn't like the idea of the television for babysitting and I still question the computer as taking the place too, but desperate times... She loved the starfall site and we would sit there with her and use that one along with some preschool games, but around 2 (I can't remember if she was 2 or a month short of 2) she took over the controls. She proved to us that she was very independent with the computer and could open up a browser and pull up her bookmarks from the list. Of course the list was long and I was concerned she would get into a site that wasn't meant for her but I also knew that there was no questionable sites in the list. More like boring research about what ever topic I was working on at the moment, but still I kept a close eye on her to make sure she stayed in her bookmarks.

As for time restrictions ... I was concerned about how absorbed she was becoming in the computer and considered a timer for her because it was coming close to an obsession, but she started to bore of it all and started to limit herself. We will go weeks without using the computer and than one day she will decide to get on pbskids.org and spend maybe an hour on the computer and again it will be another week or two before she asks to use it again. I say it really depends on the child. Some will become obsessed with games and computers and will need limits and some will find it useful for a little while and look to do something else. I suspect that if I went out and bought her something new to play on the computer we would find ourselves back into the red zone and see her computer time go up so I might still set a timer for her when and if she does start to obsess over it again.

Suggestion for a mouse: If you are concerned about the mouse being too big for your DD's hand you might want to consider a wireless laptop mouse. They are about half the size, but are fully functional. My DD just used regular size ones and she had no issues.

Thanks everyone for the BTDT advice. It's good to know that I'm not the only one that has gone through all this craziness. DD did decide to sleep on the weekend but I'm starting to think she could be really under-stimulated during the weekdays? The only times she's slept through the night have been when she was in daycare for one week while I was at a conference or over the holidays while visiting family members. So maybe she just needs to be around a bunch of people ALL THE TIME. I don't know... Because once Monday rolled around she was back to nap avoidance, ahh!!!

I think the appeal of the computer for her is really twofold: 1. she LOVES the songs. We realized today that she was actually singing part of the "a" song today so we joined in and she started doing all the hand signs, it was sooo cute! I think I might try and go on there and learn some more of the songs to sing to her. I'm really bad about remembering to sing nursery rhymes and the such so it could be she wants more music in her life. She's always been a big fan of music and was in baby heaven when we took her to a free trial music class (but, unfortunately, we can't afford the $$).

2. Learn the letters. I just don't really do much of anything academic with her. We play A LOT, read, cook, etc. but I don't even really sing the alphabet song to her because I never think about it. I know she's always been interested in them and will ask me about them whenever she seems individual letters on signs etc. so maybe I should make a point of finding ways to introduce them to her.

I think DH might be the one to do the site with her more... he really LOVES it. Mostly because he's a non-native English speaker who learned pretty much entirely from osmosis. So it's actually really fun for him to learn about long and short vowels. However, my husband refers to the adults that sing on there as "the creepy guy" and the "crazy lady".

As for some downtime for me I guess it won't be for awhile. She'll play with her dollhouse for a bit and today she was busy potty training her stuffed monkey, so hopefully he has a lot of misses and it'll take awhile!!! She tried putting the cat on there once, it didn't work as well...

I have to admit, that comment about her memorizing the books. I could definitely see that. She'll point at words a lot to find out their meaning, so who knows? She's really not into reading books in a linear fashion and will flip back at forth and really focus on certain pages at times. Oh, what I'd give to know what this kid is thinking!!!

About the pace of starfall. It's really the only kid site we've tried and I just found out about it from seeing people here talk about it. I kind of like the slow pace just because I remember reading somewhere that faster pace TV commercials are bad for kids, so I figured the same would apply here.

What is BTDT?

BTDT- been there done that