"when confronted with a 7 year old who thought the only entertainment available was Unreal Tournament on my laptop"

You mean there are *other* forms of entertainment out there?

Disclaimer: I have only a very passing notion of what 'Unreal Tournament' is - something cricket related I believe, no? - and as dad to a 3-year old (or he will be in a week) and a 4 month old - both boys - I have all of this ahead of me... today's Interesting Dad Experience was making Iggle Piggle and Upsy Daisy cookies from a kit. Number one son was happily involved until an disagreement over the selection of the best utensil for mixing the dough, whereupon said young fellow proceeded to throw the mother of all tantrums leaving yours truly to do the rest accompanied by a caterwaul of toddler wailing... the moral of the story being that it's probably much easier to park them in front of the telly to watch some cricket or whatever it is that UT is, than confront them directly...

Disclaimer 2: Of course I actually know that Unreal Tournament has nothing to do with cricket. I'm not even precisely sure what cricket is, to be honest......

I'm yet to enter the frightening/rewarding world of parenthood yet, but luckily I have been a child; so I can speak from that side of the fence. I think I was fortunate to have siblings who were a similar age to me, and I used to spend hours with my older brother doing things other than watching TV. Fair enough, we had the spells on the Amiga (usually Lotus Challenge or Sensible Soccer) but we'd basically play Figure Football(R) in the hall all through the weekend. He was older, he'd always win.

The game was basically subbuteo, but with action-figures and a table-football football(!). I even used to go as far as making up results, and league tables similar to the information in the Rothmans/Sky Sports yearbooks. Figure Juniors (his team) and Figure United (mine) would always come first and second. Figure Athletic would always come last. My original right-back, the imaginatively named Pirate, broke his leg getting into the Ghostbuster car one day. His place was soon taken by one of the WWF wrestlers, Butch.

Fifteen years on, I can still name my first-eleven, and their positions if I wanted to, plus the figures that were dropped from the team as new players were "signed" on birthdays and at Christmas.

1. A lot of this is to do with the degradation of language, in which adults are complicit. Every time they describe anything they disapprove of as "a bit crap" and anything they approve of as "absolutely brilliant" they make it more likely that children will describe anything which isn't their preferred option in any situation as "boring". They don't have a spectrum of feelings. They have extremes. You can see this in children's attitude to food. When I wor a lad I was allowed to dislike a few sorts of food; the rest I was expected to eat. Nowadays small children regard all food as guilty until proven innocent. They like a few things. Everything else is "disgusting".
2. Never forget that TV is essentially a machine for making us more stupid. It has one basic message: keep watching.

Totally agreed Badgerking, when I'm doing the Uncle thing with my nephews (12 and 5 years respectively) I'm amazed at hearing myself say things I never thought I would like "When I was your age I would have been pleased to have...." and so on.

I think it's a bit more than TV drugging the nation though. We are overwhelmed with choices and options, and so we all tend to retreat to what we know. So the lads stay barely engaged by the nonsense on Nicktoons and Jetix until anything new passes by.

That said, I think we as adults in loco parentis are complicit in feeding the habit; buying them the plethora of things they insist they need.

We valued what we had as kids as we had less, so it was more valuable to us. As toys become near disposable commodities, they are seen as worthless by their buying market and so "boring" if not the newest, spikiest, loudest or whatever.

Imagination is still there; the 12 year old has had a running narrative epic with his Lego linked to his own hand-drawn comics for the last few years. The 5 year old is copying his brother, in his way. I have hopes for them both.

You have my vote in the end of year Word Awards, "Grumpy Victorian Parent/Adult" category. I totally agree with you though. It is very concerning and stunts imaginative growth. But, wait until these kids start on Facebook. Its even better at time wasting than TV.

I like to withdraw all technology from the children every so often. They start by complaining bitterly but at the end of the period of "deprivation" they are reading Nietszche in the original German. And happier.

Mind you each January I knock the booze on the head for a few weeks and feel immeasurably better for it. Really enjoy that first drink in Feb, though.....

because they don't involve any imagination. Technology has made "better" and "better" toys but are they actually doing a good job of entertaining/engaging children. I would say often not at all.

Children are told they will be entertained by these toys, by the TV, by their peers, by culture in general. Their parents, grandparents and all other adults who can tend to buy them these toys because they want them to be happy and to have the same "opportunities" as other children.

But the toys are lacking. They are boring. Just as so much at school is actually boring and so much on TV is actually boring.

Plus there is the element of choice. There is so much choice on offer and humans minds are bamboozled by this. We simply aren't designed for it. If it is hard for us adults to deal with the modern world imagine how it is for developing minds.

Then there is also the aspect that David Hepworth describes of children not having the language to describe their complex emotional responses to the world. Often the word boring is used almost as a reflex, like small talk, to bridge the silence.

And also children are aiming for adult attention and they get that by complaining rather than staying quiet.

Imagination still exists in the world of children of course. Much of it hidden from adults by the fact that children don't always want to share it with them and because adults are often to busy to notice it in children. I work with children and they are as interesting and inspiring as they ever were. Culture however hits them in many ways harder because they don't have the shield of comparison that we do. They don't remember the good old days. The days they are living are the only ones they've had.

As for TV it is immersive, just as the Internet is, it stimulates the senses so fully that you are transported from having to deal with the world. Many fantastic TV programmes that stimulate the imagination exist for adults and I am sure they exist for kids, but in both cases they are the minority, the rest allows you to turn off by turning on.

With one child being the norm today, kids are the dictators of their own little worlds a lot more than we were.

I was an only child too, but had barely an hour after coming home from school to eat Me-Tea and watch TV before I'd hear a knock on the door and a little voice piping up, "Is Archie playin'?" If it was raining, the friend or friends would come in. If not, we'd go outside to refurbish the den under the bridge at the disused railway cutting, play Whirlybirds (a game that largely consisted of jumping out of trees and climbing up them again), oil our bogeys,* or terrorise the woman at No. 43 (served her right for being so snotty when we called round cob-coaling).

But we had to negotiate what we did. If you thought a given activity was "boring", you'd try to convince the others. If you failed, you either accepted what they were doing or you had no-one to play with.

In fact, now I think about it, I saw very little of adults at all, until it was time to go home for Me-Bath and bed. I certainly didn't expect them to lay on my entertainment.

But now, what with so much traffic and generalised paedophiliaphobia, kids are "protected" by being either stuck indoors alone or regimented into hideous, joyless McParties, with parental surveillance of their every McBurp.

Archie Jr. and Archina are 5. They watch about an hour's TV a day (interestingly, it's the ancient stuff they like best - currently Top Cat). The rest of the time we leave them to their own devices, usually in the garden. (They're currently building a dead-critter collection, with a rat skull as the prize exhibit). I'm sure the day will come - and probably sooner rather than later - when because of peer pressure they'll demand Things With Buttons and Screens, but at least for now their leisure time isn't that different from mine at their age.

Oh, and "Disgusting" is a sanctionable offence at our dinner table.

___

* It was like shaking your booty, but messier.

I'm not sure children are left to be bored often enough anymore. I'm certain I probably complained about being bored all the time when I was a child too, it's just that I was left to get on with being bored until I chose to do something about it myself and used my imagination.

If a child complains these days, adults seem to all too quickly try to placate them with yet another toy or TV. And I suspect the television is often the really easy option here, therefore the one most requested by kids.

Without some boredom and patience, I'm not sure you can really develop an attention span. Sometimes you just have to stick with things to get to the good bit.

electric dreams or what ever it is called on BBC 4? This issue came up there - very interesting how the DS kids were quickly playing on their choppers when even videos weren't available during the 1970s segment

but some toys by being more elaborate have got more boring. You mention bionicles look at how Lego has filled the space between reality and imagination.

The first is the first set I got back in the 70's it was excellent but blocky the details of fire trucks etc we filled in ourselves. the latest literally leaves nothing to the imagination.
I have some blurry 110 pictures I took of my attempts at starwars lego they pale compared to the ready made kits of today we did howver spend all morning making them and improving them searching for the right brick and proportion largley from memory.
Not sure how you tackle this. No one would want kids to go back to playing with coal but we need to have space for the imagination to play in.

tonight I watched Arthur ("Such a pleasure to meet you... one usually has to frequent a bowling alley to meet a lady of your stature") and Harry Hill's TV Burp ("See, I like Ahimsa [non-violence] and I like Satya [truth]...but which one is best? There's only one way to find out...").

This is early Saturday evening TV! Your kids will be fine.

shooting a video, scripted by my son (9) - where he explained the replica Greek lyre he had made, then mimed to a recording of actual lyre music he found on the internet.
He dressed in a Greek costume (a converted bed sheet) & his sister (5) sat in the background, similarly attired eating grapes. We filmed in a Greek style folly at a local landscape garden. This was his homework, he wanted to do it & we all had great fun.

Message: don't teach kids to watch TV - teach them to make it!

PS He goes to an ordinary state school which believes in giving kids some freedom when it comes to project work - he gets conventional homework too, which, with our support, he also likes to do.

4 boys to 24, 18 and 13 (twins) respectively fairly safely so far. They've watched a lot of TV and played a lot of computer games and they are none the worse for it. They play football, cricket, skateboard and I only ever hear "bored" when it's raining. Fifa 10 and Wii sports become family events, computer gaming can fire the imagination. Television is cartoons, Mythbusters, Malcolm in the Middle and The Simpsons among others but never more than an hour at a time. They play guitar and have a social life, both out and on line.
In essence I've been lucky but if a child is bored in 2009 then someone, somewhere really isn't trying hard enough and it isn't the child.

unscientific though it may be, is that I think the alleged damage caused to children by TV and computer games is overstated.

I have two girls, one approaching 6 and one approaching 4, and my experience is that they will not (as is the popular fear) watch TV until told otherwise, but will independently get fed up of it and (in the immortal words) go and do something else more interesting instead. This will involve role playing with such apparently mundane, non-interactive objects as kitchen equipment, paints and soft toys (sometimes an interface of all three!).

I would recommend Steven Johnson's brilliant Everything Bad is Good For You, which was, IIRC, given a positive review in a previous Word by a certain A. Collins.

I don't know where to start having 'dated' a girl with a 4 and a half year old, for some time and as an only child brought up by a single parent in the 60s, I seriously wanted to punch the ADF brat out many a time.

too much fun = too much boredom

Lego™ was all I needed

Children feel the passing of time differently.

Back in the olden days my father insisted on watching a TV show on Sunday mornings called Wide World of Sport. It was ENDLESS! Although I liked sport I could never sit through it. It ran from 9am to midday. Three flipping hours. Do you recall how long three hours felt when you were little? It was an eternity.

The older you get the faster time seems to pass. I presume it's due to your frame of reference, as far as you are concerned your memory goes back to infinity. I'm 46 and one year to me isn't long, however to an eight year old twelve months is a full 1/8 of infinity!

That means as you age your perception of any time-span not only seems shorter it actually is shorter. Kids in any era get bored easily partially because for them time drags.

...as the father of three - there's nothing wrong with Wii's, DS, computer etc., but I haven't learned a way of playing them without getting overly obsessed, so I don't think it's reasonable to expect a 7, 6 or 3 year old to do otherwise.

We have one rule - nothing electric gets switched on until after dinner. It's amazing how quickly they fall back on their imagination.

As for kids watching more TV these days, I think that's a fallacy. When I grew up in the 70s I watched TV all the time. The only difference is that these days there's kids' programming all day on digital. Back then, we'd be watching anything - Crown Court, The Cedar Tree, Mavis Nicholson, Jack Hargraves and his shed...

He who prides himself on giving what he thinks the public wants is often creating a fictitious demand for low standards which he will then satisfy.

(BTW, should we blame the TV, the programmers or ourselves for putting up with it?)

distinction to be made between playing computer games and watching TV. The latter is passive while the former can be good for co-ordination, puzzle-solving etc.

If you've got no imagination, then you've got no imagination. Nothing can be done to save you.

...mobile phones, 24 hour kids TV etc, we'd have been doing the same as the present generation. My kids do enough 'outside' stuff for me to feel comfortable with them doing 'screen' stuff.

The major difference between now and then, as I see it, is that there are more organised activities for kids than there used to be. Clubs and societies are numerous and reasonably cheap. EG I never learned tennis as such, I just played it with my Dad; now tennis lessons teach my kids and I play against them. Another significant difference is the use of the bike for pleasure. I was on mine day in day out; we take our kids out on them as though it's a special trip. That's a shame.

This amazing film from 1976 was remarkably prescient about the power of TV to turn us into dummies.

Howard Beale (Peter Finch) has many rants about TV's negative effects. Here's a good one:

"So, you listen to me. Listen to me: Television is not the truth! Television is a God-damned amusement park! Television is a circus, a carnival, a traveling troupe of acrobats, storytellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, side-show freaks, lion tamers, and football players. We're in the boredom-killing business! So if you want the truth... Go to God! Go to your gurus! Go to yourselves! Because that's the only place you're ever going to find any real truth."

Monkey see, monkey do.

If the culture of the household is TV dominated, then kids will assume that's how to spend leisure time. I think TV is a fine way to spend your downtime, as long as you balance it with other things. Children don't know that innately. Adults must teach them.

TV can be amazing & it can be awful - the medium itself isn't at fault - it's how we use it.

Think of those big historical events: the first Moon landing, Live Aid, the fall of the Berlin Wall... TV was a massive component in showing the world what was happening - TV was crucial to the success of Live Aid - it was all about TV.

Kids need to learn about the power of TV - negative and positive - and then be able to make informed choices. Prohibiting something always makes it more attractive. I watched a fair bit of tele growing up - I don't think it has hampered me, especially. In fact I think it fuelled (fuels?) my imagination. I'd take characters from TV shows and films and write stories about them. My kids (sorry to keep harping on about them - they are my only real frame of reference) do the same.

And, thanks to Harry Hill's mighty TV Burp (mentioned above) they get a weekly digest of good and awful TV without having to watch it! They can see from this that TV can be sent-up, that it isn't all powerful, that we can question it.

The best thing we can do? - teach children to think for themselves.