Learner Dad: My kids have an incredible appetite for screen time

"It’s one obsession at a time - I can remember the level of commitment I brought to collecting soccer cards at that age."

Picture: iStock 

I think the internet is great for kids. Yes, you have to watch out for bullying and stranger danger, but our parents had to do that too, 20 years before anyone even had a PC. And as for too much screen time, I remember begging my mother to let me watch telly when I came home from school, even when the only thing on our single-channel TV was a Soviet-era cartoon from Poland called Lolek and Bolek.  I didn’t care, it still beat doing my homework or helping my mother peel the carrots. Anyway, this telly addiction didn’t do me any harm - I still love a good or even mediocre show these days, it’s one of life's great pleasures.

If my kids grow up with a mild addiction to YouTube and Netflix, good for them. This doesn’t chime with the attitude towards the internet that a parent is supposed to have, which is somewhere between mild panic and the ‘won’t someone please think of the children’ sentiment expressed by Helen Lovejoy in The Simpsons.