We gave our
11-year-old son an iPod Touch for Christmas. It was a cop-out gift. We couldn’t
think of anything “big” and his siblings were getting big presents. All he’d
mentioned he wanted were nerf guns and ridiculously-expensive Lego sets. My
problem with those choices is that Lego land mines carpet the floor of his room
and every time I vacuum any room in our house I am forced to stop multiple
times to pick up nerf bullets of every shape and size. (I would suck them right
up which would be satisfying but ultimately mean more work for me since they
clog up the vacuum.).
In an act of
desperation, and with complete lack of forethought, we purchased an I-touch.
Here’s another
little piece of background knowledge you should have – this child is my most
screen-addicted off spring. He’s a sweet, obedient child but screens bring out
a desperate, lying side we rarely see. Until he discovered the joys of YouTube
and Minecraft we rarely fought. Now it is a scab we pick at daily.
So why, pray
tell, would we buy him his own personal screen? Good question.
A few years ago,
I spent a year breaking a particularly difficult horse. What made him difficult
wasn’t his attitude, but his curiosity and his smarts. He taught me time and
again that if I wanted him to make the right choice, I needed to make the right
choice easy. Putting a screen under my child’s nose is not making the right
choice easy.
