GIFT IDEA SPOTLIGHT

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We have turned into a society dependent upon electronics and technology to entertain us. This has some drawbacks and some merits. The drawback is that our children are less able to entertain themselves. Their play involves gadgets and machines that require little imagination. The days of creating your own fun by using your imagination and whatever you find laying around the house have all but disappeared. Also many of these activities are sedentary which contributes to the rising number of obese children that there are. However, there are some merits to these devices because they increase knowledge as well as eye hand coordination.

Like a lot of parents today I rely on these modern devices to help me with entertaining my children, especially in the car. Most parents have tried the popular hand-held video games or the car DVD player to entertain their children, but many have not even thought about audio books for children. We decided that we would start using audio books for children during a portion of each drive. This would be educational and would allow us to discuss the books after they were done.

When I first talked about doing this my children thought the idea was lame but we agreed to try it on the way to grandma’s house one Friday evening. Our daughter was grumpy, our son was tired and I did not want to listen to arguments so I simply said that we would spend thirty minutes listening to the audio books for children. I put the book on, turned it to a volume level everyone agreed on and we listened. The story was interesting and the narration was very good. As the half hour approached the narrator announced that it was the end of a chapter so I stopped the recording. Both of our children said that I should leave it on. We ended up listening to the book the entire trip. When we arrived at my mother’s house the children were calm and ready for bed. On Sunday afternoon as we were getting ready to go home the children started their usual routine of complaining about having to leave. When I mentioned that I was anxious to find out how the story we were listening to ended, they remembered the audio book and got in the car.

Since then we have used the audio books for children in many of our trips, even just short trips to the mall or pediatrician. It is a shared experience and many of the stories have great messages, even for adults. You can find a nice selection of audio books for children as well as adult books at Amazon and many other retailers.