Is Your Child Addicted To An Ipad?

We often joke with Blake that he is addicted to his ipad and he agrees but is it no laughing matter? Blake is 6 and the ipad is the first thing he looks for in the morning and if we didn't intervene it would be the last thing he looked at before going to sleep. We have noticed that if he has been on it for a long period of time he turns into a monster and after speaking to another parent today I am definitely not alone.

Blake starting using the iphone before he's even started school. He would come into our room while we were sleeping, take it off charge and start playing a game. That's when we set our first rule, no iphone before 7am! It's great that kids of today are so good with technology, it will probably be an essential part of life when they're older if it isn't already plus it definitely helped teach him to read. He could read words like 'play' and 'main menu' before he could write his own name. Now though, he definitely has signs of addiction. He doesn't want to do anything else and he is irritable if you try and stop him.

This technology is a new challenge for parents. Most parenting you learn from how your parents dealt with you but they never had to face anything like this. The trouble is these devises are great entertainment for a child while parents get things done but the difficulty comes when you try and get the child off. There's tears and tantrums and there is arguments because they just need to do something or finish a level. We have taken gradual steps to decrease his ipad usage and engage him in other activities.

We found we had to set a rule that there is no ipad after 6pm or tea time which ever comes first because he had started having nightmares from going on too close to bedtime. This then gives us family time together after dinner which is a great opportunity to play a family game. We have a great selection to choose from but our favourite at the moment is Jack Straws. With the weather heating up we can encourage him outdoors onto the swings or with a game of hoopla. We just need to turn his game obsession into a love for traditional games.