I am seriously contemplating if my decision to buy my son a DSI device was the right decision. We limit his play time to 20 minutes a day and it has been this way for about a year now. Lately, we started to find out that he is possessed with his DSI. I already wrote another post about his “forgetfulness” when he holds the device in his hand. Yesterday, we had another incident.

My wife took the kids to my girl’s gym. My son is not allowed to play there so he left his DSI in the car. On the way back from the gym, he was excited to start playing with his DSI and forgot about everything else. He did something that even as a toddler he never did. He ran in the parking lot and was almost run over by a car. Both my wife and I see this incident as a warning sign. We called him over at dinner time for a talk. We told him about our decision: “You are too pre-occupied with the DSI. When you hold it or about to play with it, it is as if everything else melts away. We can not agree to this behavior. Today you were almost run over by a car just because your mind was already thinking about your DSI. We decided that this can not go on anymore and this is your last warning in this matter. If we catch you one more time delving into the DSI device and forgetting about everything else, we will simply take it away from you indefinitely. You are a big boy now and can make your own decisions. Your actions will determine if you can have the DSI or not”. He nodded (well, he has no other options anyway).

We hope that this is the end of this story.

Incoming search terms:

I was talking to a friend of mince, and naturally the conversation focused on our kids. His son is almost 5 and he proudly told me how his son is very independent, which of course sounds like music to my ears. He continued on by saying that his son is very into cars and that he taught him how to put the key in the ignition and start the car.

Now, I am all for independent educated kids, but there are still some things that a parent need to take into account and one of them is to match his kid’s ability to rationalize things to their age. My kids are very familiar with the car. They open the doors by themselves, the windows when it is too hot and even the radio when they sit next to me when we park the car, but there is a huge difference between these and starting the car.

In my opinion, teaching a kid to start a car is like teaching him to start a fire. There is a very thin line between independent kid and over confident one and that line is crossed when a kid is taught something that is beyond his comprehension and that can harm him.

After all, once a kid is taught how to start a car, he can easily sneak out start it, because it is now a play thing and accidentally do something that will either launch the car or create some kind of danger to himself.

My kids saw me starting our cars hundreds of times and even asked me to do so. My answer was the same: “There are some things I let you do, and some I do not. This is one of those things that only when you grow up, I will let you do. For now it is simply too dangerous for you to try”.