I'm told that a child should only be allowed to watch 2 hours of television per day and the term television also includescomputer time. I can see some logic in this which makes my argument for getting Baby Dumpling a computer a little more difficult.
The story goes like this:
Baby Dumpling has learned, over the past year, how to navigate to her approved websites as well as navigate within those websites to find what she wants to do. We do limit the activities to educational things like spelling, counting, and so on. We let her go to PBSKIDS and NickJr for now. Her knowledge of how to use a computer has grown quite a bit during the past 6 months, so much in fact that she can use Google search to find PBSKIDS.Org when she wants to visit that site. Now when I'm using the computer to do my school work (I lost my job over a year ago and decided that I needed to return to school) she will ask me if she can use the computer. Usually she's really nice about asking. She will come up say, "Daddy are you done with your homework?" or "Daddy are done with your test?" and I ask why and she says she wants to use the computer. If I'm done I will let her use it or I'll ask her to wait until I'm done. Most of the time it works out, but sometimes she feels that I'm using the computer more than her and she will insist that it is her turn, so we negotiate how long is her turn and when it will be my turn again.
My solution to this problem was to get Baby Dumpling her own computer, except computers are not really cheap and because we don't have a lot of money at this time I had to find a way to get a cheap computer that will handle what she will use it for.
At the college I'm attending the computer lab has a really great program. They get donated computers from local companies and people, fix or upgrade them and give them away to students that need them. It's a great program and the instructor expanded it to include the community. The way it works is; anyone who has a broken computer can bring it to the school and if it can be repaired the students repair it. If it can't be repaired the person is offered a free working pc, with the understanding that it does not get sold. When it's broken or no longer needed it gets returned to the school, that's why it's called a loaner. This is done free of charge, and if someone needs a computer but can't afford one all they need to do is go to the school and ask for one, and they get one for free. Because a lot of people can't afford a computer right now there is usually a waiting list of a few weeks. It's really nice that someone is turning a learning situation into something that benefits the community.
So I explained my situation to the instructor and he said, "no problem, just put in the work order and we'll get one built for you." In a few weeks Baby Dumpling will have her own computer, which brings up a situation of how much time will she be allowed to use her computer in a day. My wife says no more than 2 hours. But if it's set up where she can get access to it whenever she wants then how to limit the time she can spend playing on the computer. One solution that has been discussed was placing the computer in a place that she cannot reach so she will have to ask for help to turn it on, but children have a way of working out problems or situations so they can get what they want. Some children build ladders out of chairs and boxes to reach the candy, and as most parents know children are very resourceful. They can make just about anything out of anything, usually they make something out of the most dangerous thing they can find, but they do try and keep trying until they succeed, get caught or get hurt. The final option to make sure we know when Baby Dumpling is using the computer is to turn the surge protector off when the computer is not in use and put the computer in a place that she currently can't reach. That should buy some time, a month or two, before we need to come up with a different plan.
We'll see if my plan works...
