How much computer time for 3yr old?

[Biggie]

Heard about starfall.com from this forum and my 2yr8mth is hooked. He can open the laptop and start the browser by himself so I sometimes have to hide the laptop. I'm starting to use a kitchen timer to limit each session to 30min.
How long does your kid spend on computer each day?
(I can't set up a poll )
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[nicolejoy]

My daughter (3) also likes to play the computer and iPad. In my opinion, if she's playing educational games, I don't mind so much. That said, she doesn't tend to play for more than 30-60 min in a day anyway. Now videos are a different story!! I do have to actively restrict that. I think that your kitchen timer idea is a good one though - if for no other reason than it's good for their eyes to not be on the computer for too long. Is he learning from it though?

 

[Biggie]

He is playing math and english games that are too advance for him. But I figured eventually he'll get it. But if we let him, he can spend over 1hr on computer each time, and 2-3 times a day. I sometimes do that if I need to do some work and no one can watch him.
We haven't found any videos that he would watch for too long. He doesn't like anything that got scary parts or bad guys or car crashing etc.
I'm worry about his eyes and his posture...

 

[thanka2]

My son is 3-years-old and he rarely watches TV at our house. We don't have cartoon channels and he hasn't shown a huge interest in any of the cartoons he has seen. When he's at his grandparents' house for a day on the weekends, I know he watches at least 2 hours of TV/day. He watches his favorite Japanese superhero cartoon and then he watches usually an educational phonics DVD before bed. Their TV is always on. But, at home we're not big into TV.

I would say maybe once or twice a week I let my son sit down and watch Word World or Curious George on PBS.com. I have Kipper DVD that he watches sometimes. If he watches a cartoon for a solid hour, to me that is plenty. And he doesn't do this every day. When he plays games on PBS.com online, usually I'm nearby monitoring him or helping him with it. He rarely does this. The great thing about Word World and Kipper is that each episode is no more than 15 minutes so he doesn't need to watch a full hour in order to enjoy a fun story. Sometimes when I'm trying to get something done, I'll let him watch 4 or 5 episodes in a row but that's not often.

So, if my child was having 3 hours of "screen time" every day, I would personally feel that was excessive. I would much rather that he be involved in making something with his hands or playing in another way. I picked up some very interesting workbooks from a discount book store in the TST East Station for $10 HKD/each that have stickers and games for different areas including math, reading, writing and phonics. He really enjoyed doing a few pages in those and for me to help him with some. The nice thing is that unlike doing something online, after he's done he has something to show or display about his work which makes him feel really proud and we hang his work up in his room. But, my son is a bit odd in that he LOVES to do homework and gets excited to do his assignments from kindergarten and asks for extra work from me.

We don't have an iPad but if we did I would really limit his time on that as well. That's just how we do things.