*&^%$# kids making *&$#$%% sick again

[angharad_gam]

Yes, I am sick again. Just a head cold, but don't they have their own particular brand of suckiness? This morning I had a big lump of mucous in my head that couldn't seem to make up its mind as to whether it was leaving via the nose or the throat (well if I get to be sick, you get to be grossed out!). Ashwyn is here btw, so expect strange insertions of baby type to crop up at random intervals.

As you might have guessed from the title, I am blaming the kids for making me sick - Ashwyn specifically. It seems to be pretty much a guarantee that anything he gets I will get too. He gave me the RTI, and a couple of days ago he got a cold and now voila.....

Still it does mean I have managed to finish the budget for my ball and read no 4 in the Temeraire and a book called Why TV is Good for Kids: Raising 21st Century Children by Catherine Lumby and Duncan Fine.

I thoroughly agree with most of what I read in this book, which was not just about TV but all kinds of 'moral panics' around things to do with young people and people and children, such as obesity, video games and literacy.  But I must confess to a certain amount of occasional guilt at the amount of electronic media my children are exposed to. So now you will have to excuse me while I have a bit of a rant (and probably a bit of an incoherent one) on the subject.

I remember telling someone at work with a certain amount of pride that my 22 month old daughter could operate a computer (which she could - she was able to switch it on, put in a CD and navigate through the various menus and icons to run the programs that she wanted - long before she could read), and receiving a somewhat less than enthusiastic response. And of course last year my father rang up quite concerned because he'd read about a study that suggested that children's brains could be altered by playing computer games (and normally my parents are pretty good about butting out when it comes to my and Andy's parenting decisions). And just recently Baroness Susan Greenfield came out and said something similar .

Uh-oh, I am nearly out of batteries. So much for ranting. Needless to say, as a statistician I come down on the side of the statistics which are almost always far less alarming than the media would have you believe, as a scientist on the side of Steven Johnson , who suggests that having your brain altered is not necessarily a bad thing (after all, pretty much anything you do alters your brain), and as a parent on the side of Catharine and Duncan, who suggest it is more important to teach your children to sensibly navigate the reefs and shoals of the modern world than to shield them from it completely.