I can't be the only one who thinks tablets have the potential to be an extremely positive early-stage developmental and educational aid? Of course, abandoning

I can't be the only one who thinks tablets have the potential to be an extremely positive early-stage developmental and educational aid? Of course, abandoning your child in front of an iPad for hours on end is not good parenting - no one is suggesting it is. Plonking your little one in front of a TV for hours is just as bad for the same reason. There's no reason at all why focused play on a tablet now and again shouldn't take its place alongside books (those great ones with the thick chewable cardboard pages), dolls, chunky plastic diggers, balls and building blocks - and TV, now and again. Getting in and playing with computers fairly early did me a world of good, and allowed me to much more effectively develop my interests. I still have an enduring love of dinosaurs thanks to an old DOS program called Burt's Dinosaurs. I played on games that taught me basic arithmetic. I learned how all manner of things worked. It was great! And in a world where technology itself is getting to be so central to everyday life, it is much better to learn how to be familiar and comfortable with it than to run away and pretend that we can insulate our children from it forever. Tablets are interactive, media-rich, the children that play on them develop amazing coordination, and it's a format that can provide great material wrapped up in a way that makes learning fun for children. I can only guess that so many are uncomfortable with the idea of this product because it suggests prolonged unsupervised play, rather than problems with tablets themselves?