My kids play with my iPad all the time. They listen to the music, play the games and love love love it. So much so that my mother (who would have never dreamed of it for us) got them their own iPad.
Good points; there’s a great program for arabic writing you could buy for the iPad. unfortunately it doesn’t say the names of the letters but I sit there with J when she is using it and tell her what each letter is. The books you can download are also beautifully animated and some of them are narrated as well.
But who are we kidding, they play stuff like Plants VS Zombies and Angry Birds more than they use it for reading or writing Arabic.
When they got it I set it up for them and downloaded my music onto it and made sure not to have anything with the “explicit” sign beside it and gave them a quick pat and said “enjoy!”.
A week later, I had J sitting beside me singing the Katy Perry song ‘California Girls’. I had bought it as part of a compilation album and didn’t think much about it when I added the album to the kids iPad. But when my J started singing the lyrics I was speechless. My 4-year-old was sitting there colouring, singing “Sex on the beach, we get sand in our stilletoes” Of course coming from her it sounded like “Sac on the beach, we get sac in a silero” but either way, I remembered what the lyrics really were!
I then took the iPad to “update it” and deleted all the songs except for the Michael Jackson, Jackson five and some album called 101 children’s party songs. The next day, I had two very upset children wanting to hear the good songs.
EVERYTHING IS RUDE! you don’t notice how rude till you have kids! I mean OMG! My children love Jay Sean’s song ‘Do you remember’ that include the lyrics “Girl take a sip of the champagne take a lil trip down my lane my girl” and Travie Mccoy’s song ‘Billionaire’ and Pinks song ‘So What”. Just put on MTV and pretend you are like 5 and listen!
I couldn’t put the songs back on their iPads. So I went on itunes to try to find something they can listen to that won’t make me freak out and that is not so lame that they will come to me with “how come (insert name here) can listen to what he wants”.
Then I found Kidz Bop on itunes. I LOVE THESE PEOPLE! they have apparently been around for a million years (9 actually). They have 19 albums out so far of children doing covers of the latest songs in the charts and making the lyrics age appropriate! Check out the 18th album track list.
I know most of these thing, if not all, go over their heads. I mean I didn’t realize that Rizzo thought she was pregnant in Grease till I was much older. Actually, when I watch many of the movies we used to see when we were younger there is so much that I just didn’t get. But for my peace of mind, and so that my kids can stay kids for as long as is possible without it being weird, I will monitor all they watch and listen to.
So for anyone out there who has a little diva like my little J who is too high and mighty to listen to the Hokey Pokey or Little Peter Rabbit go to itunes and download all the kidz bop albums.
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