Great thread. My son is only 2 so I'm not quite into this realm yet, but he's starting to express a high level of interest in my iPad games. He's currently going through an airplane obsession and will play flight control for 15 minutes whispering "airpain" the whole time. I suppose he doesn't play it as much as he watches the planes fly around and crash into each other.
In my experience kids have a funny way of throwing curve balls into my planning structure, but at this point I'm planning for the rules to be something along these lines:
- After school until dinner (approx. 2 hours) is free time to watch tv or play video games
- I'll probably use the esrb rating system as a strong guideline. Exceptions will be looked at on a case-by-case basis, but mature games won't be considered until at least the teenage years.
- After dinner is home work time. Given that kids tend to not have much homework, I would say whatever time is left over also belongs to them.
You can only draw on the experiences of yourself and those close to you for stuff like this. My parents were very lenient about video game/tv time and I was given a fair amount of control. While I did spend a great deal of time in front of the idiot box I was very social, played sports and did reasonably well in school. I know friends who were under much tighter restrictions and I can't say they came out a whole lot differently than I did.
If my boy can grow up to be respectful, polite and reasonably hard-working I don't really care how much time he spends playing games.
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