Do you imagine your life without a smartphone, tablet or laptop (computer)? I'm definitely not. They are part not only of ours work, but part of the life. Children, seeing all this, copy us and stick to all gadgets tightly.
Many articles and researches of psychologists on this subject had been written so I will not repeat them, but will only tell you our experience in this matter.
As with the question of toys, relations with gadgets have been formed for quite a long time and "experiments", mainly, were placed on the older child.
For a long time husband and me were fond of one popular MMORPG (still periodically fantasize that on retirement, having raised children and earning a fortune, we will play all day). One who played knows that you play at best 6 hours a day, or even all 12-20. Except, as far as I can remember, on Wednesday, since the server is on the maintenance. I entered the statics of the guild, so I also played at night. Our eldest child during the first and a half years of his life observed the picture that every day parents (mostly I, my husband had to go to work for a while) are sitting at the computer and doing something there. It is no wonder that Artem began to show a great interest to personal computer.
When Artem was about a year and a half, it was already impossible to play so much, the child began to forcefully demand attention to himself. Then we moved North part of country and left a gaming computer in Yekaterinburg. Therefore, the question with the games fell by itself.
The next gadget for the child was a tablet. We bought it "exclusively for developing games." However, no matter how we filter the content, the child still found a way to go to youtube and watch everything. The last straw in this disgrace was the fact that Artem, who did not really speak Russian (even if it did not speak at all), began to talk with us on a mixture of Chinese, English, Japanese, and minionian with an admixture of Russian. Tablets and phones became prohibited.
Then the fun began. The child began to frantically beg for our gadgets. We did not hear such hysterics from him before. Most of the consequences we "clean up" to this day. The most serious (although it could be worse) is that he has very poorly developed fine motor skills and to speak in understandable language became closer to three. He is still easily overexcited if he plays games on the phone or the console.
Lisa in this way was much more fortunate. She does not know about the existence of the tablet and only guesses about computer and other games.
Here such here the post-repentance and a recognition of own mistakes has turned out. Well no one is perfect, the main thing is to draw conclusions and go on without stepping on the same rake.
What did I want to say in conclusion? Likely that children do not need gadgets. Absolutely. Up to 10 years for sure. And you need to start with a phone-caller to know where the child is. The world is very interesting and it needs to be learned by trying on the tooth, on the nose, on the eyes and other parts of the body. This is useful not only for children, but also for parents. Restricting communication with the virtual world, we give the child the opportunity to establish connections in real. And then in adolescence, he is more likely to follow the advice to you, not to Google.