In Alicia Swanson’s home office there is a laptop just for her sons to use. The boys log on frequently – to find out how to build new Lego projects or play an interactive game about San Francisco that the family found on MostFun.com.
Some might say that at ages 5 and 7, Bennett and Elliot are too young to be online. But Swanson would disagree.
“I haven’t really seen any negative drawbacks yet,” the Willow Glen resident says. Computer time helped her older son learn to read and spell early. Elliot, she adds, “doesn’t really have the addictive personality where he plays and plays and plays, so I haven’t been faced with that yet.”
There has been plenty of research and philosophizing about preteens’ and teenagers’ use of computers. But very young children are also logging time with the mouse and keyboard, and parents are grappling with how much is too much, and how they can monitor what their children are doing online.
Those without young kids at home may find the statistics surprising: More than a quarter of children ages 4 to 6 use a computer during a typical day, and spend an average of 50 minutes at it, according to a 2006 study by the Kaiser Family Foundation, which examined media use by kids from 6 months to 6 years.