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New York Times: 'Screen Addiction Is Taking a Toll on Children'

Discussion in 'Sports and News' started by Dick Whitman, Jul 6, 2015.

  1. Mr. Sunshine

    Mr. Sunshine Well-Known Member

    Just tried to get my son to play with some new toys, but he just wanted to watch Thomas. :(
     
    JackReacher likes this.
  2. Jake_Taylor

    Jake_Taylor Well-Known Member

    Dredging this back up because my 4-year-old daughter is participating in a study at the local university. They are essentially replicating a study from the 1960s and they aren't quite done yet, but they are finding that on the whole kids are much, much less influenced by the media they consume than they were 50 years ago.
     
    Donny in his element likes this.
  3. Oggiedoggie

    Oggiedoggie Well-Known Member

    That's probably because they spend a lot of time working on their own blogs.
     
    Jake_Taylor likes this.
  4. Dick Whitman

    Dick Whitman Well-Known Member

    Some kid from my son's class got him playing some first-person shooter game the other day - PixelGun - that he described to me as "like Minecraft." My wife saw that he was gunning down humans, who flew away with angel wings afterward.

    Nope. Not in my house.
     
    bigpern23 likes this.
  5. LongTimeListener

    LongTimeListener Well-Known Member

    Man, you take a hard line against religion.
     
  6. Dick Whitman

    Dick Whitman Well-Known Member

    Ha, ha. SJ.com's biggest misconception. I am an Old Testament denier. But I'm a big fan of the sequel's star and, in particular, his mom. Also, go Irish.
     
  7. bigpern23

    bigpern23 Well-Known Member

    It's all I can do right now to keep my kid from pretending everything short of a cup of yogurt is a gun. I wasn't really sure why he does it so much since my wife and I do our best to limit his exposure to guns.

    Despicable Me and Gru's freeze ray are probably about the most he sees guns in the TV we allow him to watch (he gets a bit more exposure to hand-to-hand combat thanks to his current obsession with Kung Fu Panda). We also don't allow him to use his cousin's Nerf guns and any water guns he has do not actually resemble guns (he has some foam water sprayers, where you draw back the knob of the foam tube to fill it with water and then push it in to spray).

    I walked with him into preschool the other day and four boys were running around pretending to shoot each other with ... dinosaurs. [/smacksforehead]

    But, yeah, it's going to be a long time before he's gunning down humans in any video game.
     
  8. Riptide

    Riptide Well-Known Member

    What if they're right-wingers? Them things ain't human.
     
  9. Dick Whitman

    Dick Whitman Well-Known Member

    Yeah, mine loves them, too. I think "Star Wars" is a big part of it/ And probably freeze rays in "Despicable Me." And just going to other kids houses. I'll see him in the outfield pretending he's shooting down Tie Fighters, I'm guessing. Part of it is also that he seems to love world history, like WWI and WWII. But, again, it's one thing for he and I to have a Nerf war in the basement and quite another for him to be playing GTA Junior Edition.
     
    bigpern23 likes this.
  10. Mr. Sunshine

    Mr. Sunshine Well-Known Member

    Thomas is an ass-kissing bitch, but Sodor is a gun-free zone.
     
    RickStain likes this.
  11. bigpern23

    bigpern23 Well-Known Member

    If I may ask, how old is he? When did you let him see Star Wars for the first time? My son (age 4) is familiar with many of the characters and ships through books and toys, but he hasn't really seen any of the movies or shows. Our neighbor's boy is 5 and he's seen all seven.

    Hell, I was 4 when my parents took me to see ROTJ (they couldn't get a sitter and figured, what the hell?). It's one of my earliest memories, particularly the Vader/Luke lightsaber battle in the Emperor's throne room. I can still remember that vividly.
     
  12. SFIND

    SFIND Well-Known Member

    What? I can't see a logical way a person claims the sequel is more factually true than the original.
     
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