NEWS: You're Doing It Wrong, Baby

I loved Lego. Did it make me smarter? Hard to say... but should I ever spawn you can bet they'll be playing with something other than a remote control.

I always feel a little better about the world when someone uses the ™ symbol.

One might wonder why so many people want to be on youtube, why so many want to be famous.

If you're taught to worship "screen media" at an early enough age, perhaps your religion would just encourage you to become one with it, rather than know how to, say, form a complete sentence. Or talk to people honestly and insightfully, without having to rely on typing rather than speaking.

We're fun now.

my mother, being the hippie she is, always treated me as a human -- a very small one, but a person nonetheless. it was her belief that i was born with everything in me, i just didn't know how to do it yet, so she'd read me adult material and speak to me in an adult voice using proper grammar.

as it turns out, that's a great recipe for a smartass know-it-all. the jury's still out on whether it results in actual intelligence.

i have fond memory of blocks, in fact every morning when i go to shave in the mirror i'm reminded of the evil wooden weapons. i was 3 and my sister was 2. she decided to throw one at me and it landed right above my eye, splitting my eyebrow open and giving me a concussion. obviously years later after alot of therapy i can laugh at the incident. she has kids now, but i'm decidedly nervous around them, just in case they want to finish the job that their mother couldn't.

"I'll interact with my child" and "I'll give them blocks" does not exceed the purview of a single person's intentions, nor does "I'd like to be a good parent someday."

I still remember my dad out in the garage using a chop saw and electric sander to make blocks for me, which is even more touching in hindsight -- I now realize how un-handy he is with anything of the sort, but the blocks worked just fine for me and undoubtedly contributed to my present archi-geek-itecture passion. Damn good dude.

You'll be the Fluxy-mom-bomb.

I volunteer to give Flux all the babies she wants.

Mostly Aussie kids go to pre-school for the year before they enter kindergarten. Me, I went for a couple of days. When I realised that they try to make you have a nap while my favourite daytime soaps were on, I naturally rebelled, and convinced my mother to keep me at home, where I could watch Days of our Lives and The Young and the Restless.

Co-incidentally, due to the fact that I basically didn't say a word (or even emit a nonsense sound that an over-eager parent could somehow interpret as a word) until I was about 2 and a half, my parents assumed I was slow. They even put me into kindergarten a year ahead of schedule; their plan being that this way, when I had to repeat a grade, I would be amongst kids my own age. Good idea, neh?

Now, I'm not one to blow my own horn. For starters, I hear you need to get some ribs removed so you can do that. That being said, I never repeated a year, went on to a selective high school and University, and now I work in computers. I have also been a salesman, and am considered by many to be overly chatty.

The only lasting effects I can detect from overexposure to the worst kinds of television as a little fella is the tendancy to gossip more than most males, and the regularity with which my love-life becomes tangled. I've yet to be killed and replaced by my heretofore unknown twin brother, but I live in hope. Perhaps I'm the evil one - after all, I am sporting the goatee.

Luckily for the world, I have no intention of breeding at this time.

That 68% statistic is frightening... 2 years seems like an awful short amount of time for a kid to have gotten bored with everything, to the point of needing TV all day. Though, 31 years sounds about right...

Fear not, lazy parents, it doesn't seem that much harder to supervise blocks, lincoln logs, etc. than it does to supervise TV watching.

This is an interesting time for parents as we enter a more digital age. Growing up watching television for me was an outlet into worlds that I couldn't experience on a daily basis. Documentaries on HBO, Discovery, The Sundance Channel were my break from innocence. Prison systems. Drugs. Sex. All documented, and being from an extremely conservative house old in a small community there was no discussion of such things in life, no discussions on anything for that matter for better or worse I am who I am today. Not a genius. Not entrenched in mediocrity. I am not yet a parent, and up to the age of eleven or so my world was consumed with things like Lego's and Books and Mario. When I started watching TV it was to see the world that I couldn't experience, and as I said before for better worse. Did Seinfeld at 13 cost me Harvard Universtiy? Probably not. Sorry if this was a little off topic as far as relating to children.

Statistics like this always make me cringe. They also make me proud of my own mama, who knows how to raise a genius or two. At least when she did park me in front of the TV, it was usually* something awesome like 3-2-1 Contact! Oh man, I miss that show.

SPOILERS! (Click to view)

* Okay, other times it was MTV or Danger Mouse or something. Sometimes genius comes naturally?

One day our vehicles will run on babies and we'll be bragging about how many miles per child (MPC) we get.

I grew up watching the "smart" shows...Eureka's Castle, Sesame Street, The Magic School Bus. But I also watched shows that had no educational value whatsoever: Star Trek, F-Troop, I Dream of Genie, you know...garbage TV. Now, Sudoku isn't exactly my forte, but I can carry on an intelligent conversation with people without compulsory swearing (like everyone my age around here).
Hell, I remember getting bored with the kids shows because they were too dumb and wanting to watch NOVA, National Geographic, and basically all the other shows that were on the Discovery Channel before it split up into its 12 channels. I'd watch the History Channel because I wanted to, not because my parents were making me. Most other 3rd graders would come home from school, grab a Snak-Pak of oreos and a coke and plop on the couch and stare at Bugs Bunny for 3 hours until Nick and Night came on. I'd come home, grab the same snack, and plop down and watch "Great Blunders in History", or "Cosmos" with Carl Sagan.
I don't think that what the parents actually do has much effect on the child, I think it's more of what they start to do and how they steer the child into realizing on their own that learning is fun, and WAY better than being a knuckle-dragging redneck.

Are you my long-lost brother or something? I could swear I'm the only person under thirty who's ever watched F-Troop.

Slamming Baby Einstein™, Crocs™, and parents who believe their convenience outweighs the well being of their children (™?) - why, Fluxy, I think I love you.

I understand that you cannot watch your children constantly... but how about *most* of the time? Or maybe at least *know* what they're doing? Or, you know... just keep on keepin' on, and let us all turn into one big Idiocracy. I mean, if that's what you want.

*sigh*

Under thirty? I was talking with our bartender the other day who is 36, and she's never even heard of it! Which is sad sad sad. The world would be a better place if we all watched F-Troop.

It's hard not to listen to TV. It's spent so much time raising us.
-Bart Simpson.

When I saw the title of this article, I thought you had an inside scoop on my sex life with my EX-girlfriend.

Watching " Josie and the Pussy Cats " (long tails and ears for hats), drawn in anatomical cartoon glory put me down the road to where I am now.

I have a degree in Physics and 2 sons at school. One came home with something in his homework called, " wooden MABs " .... we called them blocks or rods 30 years ago - square wooden blocks of different lengths and colours.

The "unknown" acronym was for Multibase Arithmatic Blocks.

The whole world has come the full circle, though the crappy modern jargon persists.

Fluxy, when we have kids, we'll teach them to weld, grow vegetables and read ancient Greek, okay?