My childhood best friend, after whom my oldest son is named, is a scientist. (At one time his job title was "senior scientist" at the manufacturing corporation

My childhood best friend, after whom my oldest son is named, is a scientist. (At one time his job title was "senior scientist" at the manufacturing corporation where he then worked. Now he uses his training as an electrical engineer to do research on critical safety issues for a consulting firm that advises the thriving medical device industry here in the Twin Cities.) He and I grew up in the Boob Tube age of TV. But he watched a LOT less TV than I did while growing up, because when he was three years old, the family TV set broke, and his dad, who was a mechanic for a manufacturing company in town, decided that watching TV was a waste of time, so he didn't fix the TV. Instead, my friend grew up building things at home, including an electronic organ (which is one of several musical instruments he can play) and one of the first home-built microcomputers. (His older brother met Bill Gates at a computer-building convention a long time ago, and could have been a Microsoft employee with a single-digit employee number. Oh well.) Simply put, I think as a parent of four children that active avoidance of time-wasting activities is helpful for children's development. Children need time for thinking and daydreaming and reverie, but too much entertainment can take time away from those valuable activities. Richard Rusczyk, a founder of the Art of Problem Solving Foundation, comments that if video games were commonplace during his childhood, he probably would not have learned as much about problem-solving as he did while growing up. Part of a parent's job is making sure that children don't gorge themselves on candy or on nondevelopmental personal activities. Those things need to be experienced in moderation. P.S. I recently worked as a math teacher in a private middle school. Don't even get me started on pervasive use of iPads in school classrooms.