Will your child measure up?

You are looking at your child right now and thinking they are just the best little thing ever put on this earth. They are so smart and and can do anything…except play on the computer. They want to so bad they can taste it but you don’t let them on because they might break something…or worse…crash you system. So what?

Whoever said this was right…Children are our future. We must nurture that future to the best of our ability. One of the most important things, I believe, we can do as parents, computer age-blogging parents, is to let our children play on the computer. If children are our future, then computers and the gadgets that go with them are theirs.

Look at what we, as a world, have now to play and work with…the clunky desktop is out and the iPhone is in…we almost have a computer that can fit in the palm of our hand. A person can now run their small, home based business with all of their office needs found on the Internet for next to nothing.

Letters and e-mail are out and now we have tumblelogging, or microblogging, if you will, at sites such as Twitter and Jaiku. Just a few flicks of the finger and we can not only update our friends on our cyber-lives, but now the world can know our every step as well.

No more snail-mail pen-pals, like back in the good-'ol-days. Now the best way of telling all of the world about you and your thoughts and feelings and …well…whatever…is blogging. And all of you bloggers out there know just how great it is to blog–it is a lively-hood, a hobby, an obsession, a scrapbook, a journal, a family web-page, whatever we want them to be, they can be!

I think I should mention that I am already practicing what I preach. We have been letting our oldest (he is 5) play on the computer since he was about 2 or 2 1/2. He is so far ahead of other kids his age or even several years older then him. The computer has taught him in ways we never knew he could learn. He knows his ABC’s forward and back, 123’s into the 50’s, all the basic colors and shapes, he knows huge words and even how to use them, he can use a cell phone (learned from the Internet) he can operate our computer almost as well as we can, he knows his countries and states and know the type of cultural stuff that goes with each country. He has even learned to recognize different languages and speak a few words of Spanish. We could never teach him all of that. His little sister (1 1/2) is already showing an interest. She already knows to click on the X's to close stuff down and she knows how to shut the computer down from pushing the Start Button…don’t even ask…we don’t know how she knows either.

Now I know that there will be some readers that tell me that so much time on the computer will rot his brain or he won’t make friends or he will find grown-up stuff on there and, you know what, you may be right. But the Internet is based on the real world. I keep him away from bad stuff and give him the good stuff in the real world. I do that for cyberspace also—our computer is out in the open, blocking sites, kid-friendly search engine, private profile just for him, bookmark sites he likes so that is where he goes, etc.

Children are our future. I believe that in order for us to have a strong future and for our children to have a flourishing future, we need to have them learning all there is to learn about computers, the internet, and the gadgets that go with them. And if they crash our computers, oh well…to bad…so sad…we needed a bigger, better, brighter, shinier one anyway…right?