Have any of your 6 yr olds got their own laptop?

[LucyJones]

Or is it me who thinks it's completely unnecessary

and where do we stand on 6 yr olds and ds lites?

Duchesse - was she actually searching for it? I am agog that an 8 year old would actually know such a thing existed. Or am I just naive?

No.
I know a couple of people who owned computers almost all their lives and all of them are hugely successful computer programmers.

I think it's too early. My daughter uses ours.

My son got his laptop for his 6th Birthday, but he was using mine since he was 3.5 years old. He is 8 now. He uses it to play Club Penguin, research for homework, etc', but only in the lounge, when I am sitting nearby, never in his room. So I know exactly what he is up to at all times.

LOL at 6y old programmers! i dont think anyone is expecting that yet but I think it is familliarity that is important at this age - supervised and in moderation of course. At our local jumior school the children are involved in creating and updating the school website so it will come I think - tho I agree I wouldn't be comfortable with a school that relied solely on computers (not overly keen on whiteboards either when they do everything on them).

I liken it to the fact that my 5y old loves those computer colouring programs - where you colour a picture in selecting and changing the colours and the print out. But he also still loves colouring with pens and crayons and coloring books. It is just another option available to them which we didnt have, tho I do sometimes worry about overload/choice fatigue, but again, taht is the world they are living in for better or worse.

As for the porn, the parents have a responsibility to control / restrict that I think - harder when they get older tho I guess.

Moderation is the key I guess.

I think there is no harm for 6 yrs old if they are being guided by an adult. My 5 yr old has got his own login details on his school's website. So he works on his login and does use my laptop for that. I have to keep an eye on what he is doing, just to be aware of viruses etc. He also plays games, watches his favourite videos cartoons etc and search on google where he is stuck with something.

SofaQueen - DD rarely has homework requiring her to research. However when she does chose to find out about things using google, etc. I have spoken to her about reliability of information, etc. We have alked about some of it being true, some not, etc and that anyone can out anything on the computer. At 7y she has understood this pretty well. And we check stuff out together.

Duchesse - when my DD is 12/13y she will have access to the Internet all over, at school, the library, etc. I hope that my having her use the internet at home responsibly and with guidance, and having talked about internet safety that she will grow up accepting the internet for what it is, and to be aware of its dangers. At home I ill still be able to moniotor her use, much more so than will happen at school or in a library or internet cafe that's for sure.

Sofa queen.
DD age 7 - maths 20 mins homework 3x per week is set online and has to be submitted to the school website. When child logs on the school website has an automatic logout after 20 mins.
Literacy 2 units per week set online via educationcity.
Research project mainly science 1 x per week this week was finding animals to classify as mammals/reptiles etc print off pictures and identify why they are classified as such. social science research monthly, this month was cities and planning a city.
Additionally we subscribe to mathwhizz and the school requires children to use the revision exercises on mathletics weekly.

Would I prefer more conventional methods yes as Im pretty old school but accept we are living in a computer age. I sometimes feel the teachers use it as a cop out ... Im probably going to get lynched for that remark?
The school is pretty hot at this age getting the children to question their sources of information so Im comfortable with their approach .

My 7 yr old DD will be getting one but due to her visual SN, she needs to learn to touch type as writing is difficult for her

My eldest saved up half the money for his (MacBook so expensivo) and he was 15 when he got it

So, I wonder where and at what stage they all learn to cut and paste from wikipedia for their essays. Apparently it's very common.

francaGTH
never mind the children the teachers are already doing it with handouts we have received.
last yr part of the school play excerpts were downloads from wikipedia.

THK - r.e. the teachers using it as a cop-out, well I'm certainly not going to lynch you!!! Obviously not in all cases but certainly DSDs' school do.

One of my DSDs, bless her, in yr6 she had a h/w to write about a planet. She just copied and pasted various things so it made no sense. She wasn't being lazy or trying to cheat - she just genuinely thought that was ok (and what's worse is, so did the teacher!) so she didn't learn anything.

My other DSD (twins) recently had h/w to play an online quiz (!!!) and she was literally copying the whole question into google, I helped her refine her search skills (only using relevant words, sifting through the results etc) - it was as if she saw the internet as a magic bullet that allowed her to bypass all thinking!

I don't know, she belongs to the "Google It" generation I suppose. Hmmmph.

My 6 year old certainly doesn't have a laptop, she has no need of one, she is just a child! She doesn't use a computer at all at home apart from very occassionally playing on cbeebies.

She also has no computer games of any kind.

There is plenty of time for all that stuff when they are older. For now my girls are perfectly happy playing with their toys, making up their own games, drawing, painting, writing etc.

DS (7) has a netbook, and he loves it, but he doesn't need it, and certainly wouldn't if we had a 'family' PC (DH and I both have laptops which belong to our respective employers). There is certainly no expectation from school that he has one, although I have come across primary schools who set homework online.

Nefret - it depends on your school I think.
99% of the time DD is doing homework so you have little choice as to how soon they need to use computers.
Shes very creative ,loves reading, drawing, singing so outside of schoolwork wouldnt be playing computer games. Its a tool for school.

MMM: yes so many times once projects have been set the children are asked to google.. I started the year really grumbling however realise its a battle I wont win with the school.

Franca - no more common than it was to copy chunks out of books. The key is to teach them to referneces any sources they use, and IME a decent teacher, and certainly moderators, find it very easy to identify c&p efforts - and will, and do, pick students up for this.

my boys aged 9 and 11 have use of computer but no loaptop. 11 yr old thinks he will be the only one in comp when he starts without a laptop. might get him a net book for xmas if he learns to look after the other comp. he will only use it downstairs they both have ds lites but we go away in a caravan walking most weekends and they r banned and mobiles switched off and no tv its so peaceful.only prob they beat me at cards lol

eve, sorry, I explained that badly. The child is a boy and he was using his mum's laptop (obv without parental controls) and she thought he was just doing club penguin. It turns out he wasn't. So actually, children who only use their own computer with the highest possible parental controls on it are probably better protected than others. But their own login on the parental computer would be just as effective, as long as it is very effectively monitored.

And to all those who think that their children will use the internet responsibly when they are 12/13 and will no longer need monitoring- well, maybe they will, but you cannot guarantee that everyone in their network will as well. I have two older children and I don't know any other parent of my 14 yo daughter's friends who aren't also on facebook and one of their child's "friends" just to keep tabs on their child and monitor what is happening in their lives.

I find it interesting that lots of people on here seem to be saying that it is okay for a child to have access on an adult's computer, but not okay for them to have their own computer.

However, a lot of these posts seem to be making a lot of assumptions...

For example - they seem to assume that it is okay for a child to use the family computer, which they assume will be in a public space. What happens if the main computer is located in a study away from the main part of the house, so that if the child uses it, they will have to do so unsupervised?

They also seem to assume that if a child has a laptop, then they will be using it in their own rooms. Why? My DD has never used her laptop in her own room. She only ever uses it when sat at the dining room table (usually sat next to me, whilst I'm mnetting )

They also seem to assume that a child should just be able to access the parent's computer. But what about those of us who have work computers that the children are not allowed to access? Or like mine, where I am not able to change the security settings? Using a parent's computer may actually be putting the child at more risk, in these circumstances.

It really is a red herring to assume that using the family computer is the safest thing for all children. As I said in my first post, everyone has got a different situation, and so people will respond differently, but it is far too naive / simplistic to assume that everyone can / will find it appropriate to just let their child use the family computer. (For us, that would be about the riskiest thing we could do - hence, she has her own!).

Also, I find Duchesse's comment also a red herring. An 8 year old looking at porn. I would be seriously worried how an 8 year old would have any knowledge about porn at all. I think far more questions need to be asked than just internet access. There is a much bigger problem there IMHO.

Sorry X Post - Duchesse. That clarifies things!

Oh but at least copying from books required a bit of effort , and having to write it, you actually memorized it.

By the way, I'd like to stress, that it is not the unsafety of the internet my main concern at this stage.
I simply don't think it is appropriate for my ds (dd is 5 and a half and not at all interested in computers, apart from the opportunity of watching bits of dora the explorer on youtube) to spend much time in front of a screen. Because, as I said earlier he is not programming or doing math problems, as he has enough homeworks already. All he'd like to do would be playing games, and I think he is just too young and should employ his time doing other things that I know he loves.
I don't know about your children, but ds doesn't have much free time. School finishes at 4.30 here, and he goes to bed at 8.30... as spring comes he plays at the park until 18.30. Not much time for the pc.

but equally cutting and pasting from online sources takes minutes if not seconds for people to pick up and identify - unlike use of obscure books like in my day

I think Ellokitty and Duchesse are right about parental controls, we find it easier to impose strict controls on a pc just for the dds, than on our own. Part of my work involves moderating on a website for teenage self-harmers, that's a site I really don't want my primary age dds browsing on.
Anyone logging into my machine can happen on that rather easily. That's one of the reasons we are happier for them to have their own pc.

Franca, you are forgetting, living in Italy, your ds can play for hours in the park. here it hasn't stopped raining since Christmas.

I personally feel, like Franca and a number of other people, that young children shouldn't be spending any very much time on the computer, but if they are going to, then maybe their own dedicated computer (whether individual or shared with siblings) may be the best option even at 6. That said, I personally feel it to be unnecessary for a child of that age and up to about A level age to have their own machine or to spend any significant amount of time on it. I believe that they should spend their childhood years being physical and learning inner calm and developing their brains, none of which is readily offered by modern computing (unlike computing of yore, as pointed out by others who were programming in Basic in the early 80s and for whom it has indeed in some cases led to lucrative careers). That is my view as a parent.

As a teacher, I would say anecdotally that the children with the worst attention spans at 11/12 are also almost invariably the ones spending the most time playing computer games (personal straw poll of 250 year 7s in 2001, all of whom I taught).