In a house full of Lego, board games, basketballs and sidewalk chalk, it’s amazing how quickly boredom can set in. The magical screen seems to fix all – it’s like a siren song, constantly calling them, beckoning them with its flickering blue light.

I’ve recently become the chauffeur for my son and his group of friends, as they go to for a weekly gaming afternoon/hangout at one boy’s house. It’s clear that my role as the driver is to be invisible – they talk and goof around with each other in the car as if I’m not there, and if I do interject in their conversation, there’s a moment when they all freeze, confused as to where this voice from above came from, before ignoring it and carrying on. I’m there to hover on the outside, not to get involved.

Sometimes I wonder if watching TV is going the way of the dodo. Remember when we were kids, and there was concern about how watching TV was going to turn all of us into mindless zombies?

Hi there! I’m Lynn Jatania, the new MediaSmarts Parent Blogger.

The internet is one wild and woolly place. It sometimes astonishes me how far we’ve come from our own childhood – days when we wrote programs in BASIC on our TI-99 and saved them on cassette tapes, and our modem made a cool whoo-eee sound while preparing to tie up our single phone line for the next three hours. We were a long way from the connectivity and social media sites that are second nature to our own children.