@davewil1964 wrote:
My question would be "What sort of parent allows a 7 year old an iPad, much less unsupervised access to it?"
Parental responsibility, yet again.
Almost all parents let children on ipads.They are looking at them from about the age of 3.
Kids absolutely had to have an ipad last year for home schooling.
I'm not saying all of it is unsupervised, most of it is but all the same, there is a lot of time wasting on it in my opinion. Any one else had to watch a Ryan episode? Kids love it, Ryam's a multi mullionaire at what? Age 8 or so? And it is nothing but a big advertisement.
Still, Ryan is wholesome compared to what 4 channel described. I'm not against gaming or online entertainment at all, but I think there should be limits. Any game that shows gang rape is not acceptable. Again, just my opinion.
I must say, I am finding some comparisons here in the comments a bit odd. I think she-elephant referred to Noddy and Big ears in bed, trying not to fall out of bed and then going to sleep.
I would read that to a child without a raised eyebrow. It isn't a sexual scenario and I don't think it would hurt any young minds. A realistic gang rape though is quite another thing. Scenes of extreme violence, ditto.
I think sometimes as adults we can read too much into things. For instance, I once had a year 3 where I wanted to introduce the work of some early Australian authors and decided to read a story by May Gibbs. It had beautiful colour illustrations, which is one of the reasons I picked it, but I was nervous as I wondered what sort of reaction I would get by a younger, sophisticated 21st century audience. After all, it contained pictures of half dressed characters and included phrases such as the 'gay nuts'.
A 5 minute read, field any difficult comments and onto something else, I thought.
But 5 minutes into it, I noticed there was dead silence, the kids were entranced. They loved the whole series. There's violence of a sort I suppose, where the big bad banksia men chase different people but good triumphs, you'll be pleased to know.
I learnt from that session that kids are perfectly capable of taking a story as it was meant to be taken and just enjoying good and evil through mild fantasy, with creatures they know are fictional.
I would prefer we leave the real life sordidness and violence till they are older, it is too scary for young children to properly deal with.