The Guardian’s Thomas Jones has an essay about techno-toddlers. To be perfectly honest, I couldn’t figure out what it was about: kids use adult technology, companies are starting to adapt technology like the iPad for kids, some people worry about this, others do not.

This is a shame, because there were a few interesting points that could have been the hook for the whole piece. In particular:

We may be dazzled and baffled by the hi-tech wizardry and newness of it all; our children take this stuff for granted. The latest technology is no newer to them than anything else they encounter. As Huggins says, “A banana and an iPad are two things that have always been there” – plus you can eat the banana; objects don’t get much more interactive than that.

And

Michaela Wooldridge, a developmental psychologist in western Canada, has for many years worked in the field of early intervention, helping parents of developmentally delayed babies. She recently carried out a study to see if the ways mothers interacted with their toddlers differed depending on whether they were playing with more traditional toys – a shape sorter, a book, a toy animal – or battery-powered equivalents. She found that with the electronic toys, “Parents were not less affectionate, but they were less responsive, less encouraging and did far less teaching. It was almost like the toy was interfering. They were trying to figure out a) how to make it work and b) how to have the child make it work.”

That work by Wooldridge– a 2010 M.A. thesis on mother-toddler interaction and toys with batteries– looks pretty interesting, by the way.