It's important for a parent to be in touch with the way their child is using media. It varies from age to age, but parents need to understand the content, violence for example, but also the actual amount of time that your child spends on media is going to affect their brain development. Obviously, media is an important part of all of our lives. With children, in a formative period of their intellectual skills and their actual brain development, we need to set some rules. One of them, that has been suggested by the American Academy of Pediatrics, is that children under the age of two have no screen time. Screen time, of course, includes television, video games and computers. This is a good rule. A lot of parents say, "Why?" The fact is that little brain, growing and developing according to nature's program, needs a lot of human interaction; face to face contact, lots of language stimulation, and lots of three dimensional, hands-on play, to develop the foundations for the important thinking skills that are going to come later. Once a child is in preschool or elementary school, we naturally will allow them a little more contact with various kinds of electronic media, but we still need to know what's going on. Research has shown that as screen time goes up to a certain, point, grades go down. We don't want this to happen to our children. Another issue that is very important is the growing incidents of video game addiction, especially among boys, especially among teenage boys. A wise parent thinks to themselves, "How much of this does my child really need?" and "Am I setting them up for a problem later on?" A wise parent will also make sure that there are a lot of other important things are going on in the child's life; free play, plenty of outdoor time and other things like conversation at the dinner table or even reading out loud. All of these things can have positive brain building characteristics which the television and the video games may not have.