I'm with you, but it has to be a choice based on each parent's values. I personally LOVE video games, but my 2 year old hasn't even seen one yet, and I'm not trying to get her into them any time soon. Especially with TV I think there is plenty of time for kids to learn about it later, and they likely will not need my help to do so. Kids aren't missing anything by not playing games / watching TV, but if they spend too much of their time doing either of those they will miss out. My biggest concern is that I do not want media robbing my kids of their childhood.
Yeah, that's what I mean. I am sympathetic to onemoreact's opinion above that gaming does imbue the child with a useful mastery over abstract/virtual environments and activities, and that those skills are growing more important as we humans augment ourselves with technology. I just think that 2 is probably too young; those benefits are almost certainly going to accrue even if the child never touches a video game until, say, 5.
There's a good TED talk where they go into the differences in language processing in a child of 12 months vs 15 months. Infants and very young children are doing so fucking much to deal with learning the basic rules of the real world, and how to process human language. (One of the notable things is that American children exposed to a real human speaking Chinese to them on a regular basis were able to differentiate the sounds of Chinese as well as Chinese kids; those in control groups exposed to video of people speaking Chinese didn't fare any better than regular American kids.)
I feel like the awesome and mysterious stuff going on in the child's mind at that age in order to come to grips with the real world, in its awesome complexity, is too important to be displaced by addictive recreational activities that can just as well come later. I don't want them to become masters of the small and limited worlds in which games exist, at the expense of a diminished mastery of the intricacies and awesome breadth of the actual world we live in.
