This is less about lazy kids and more about lazy parents, which is far more marketable.

@homerjay: Exactly.

What the hell happened to *gasp* sitting down with your kid and reading with them?

Our society has degenerated to the point that we expect electronic things to babysit and raise our children. Instead of spending $14 on an electronic book that can be read to your child, go the library, check out some books - for free, no less - and spend an afternoon with the person you created, instead of offloading that responsibility onto a freaking gadget.

Lame.

@shifuimam: Just another evolution for the "let TV raise my kids" crowd

@shifuimam:

You're assuming you're wife is honest with you when she says that you created the kid.

@homerjay: Or even more so, the parents that believe that something like this will help their kid "get ahead". It dumbfounds me the number of competitive parents there are out there. All they have to do is market it as something that will give your kid a developmental advantage over other kids, and some jerkwad will buy it and rot his/her kid's brain with it.

This is clearly yet another example of the triumph of technology over common sense. Well, that is, unless Daddy can figure how to download penthouse letters on it. In which case, it's hacked for porn, FTW.

^^^^^^^^^^^
Are any of you parents?
Yes, I read to my kids every night before bed. (We have a 3 book minimum).

But I have to say, the Leapfrog line is fantastic.
Their video line is a tremendous tool for teaching children how to read. Letter sounds -> Blending sounds -> Phonics rules -> Punctuation -> Reading.

Something like this pen is not to replace a parent's duty to read to their child. But believe it or not, kids like gadgets too. If I can give them a gadget that is not just fun, but also educational, I do it. It's better then giving them just some video game.

This pen is great for a kid who is just learning to read. My son had a similar device (LeapPad) when he was learning. He would read the book and use the pen on the words that he got really "stuck" on.

Don't knock these things until you try them.

@SportBilly: I quite agree. Probably the laziest thing about the headline was me while writing it, though I think it is important to look at both sides of the "media-assisted parenting" phenomenon. Clearly some of these miracle innovations aren't all they're cracked up to be, but LeapFrog is one of my favorites to watch. (And, btw, not a parent yet, but will be in a matter of days!)

I heard leapfrog laid off 80 people recently. I didn't even know they have 80 people working for them.

@Elvisisdead: Amen. If we read to my daughter as much as she wanted us to, we'd get nothing else done in life.

Sure, lazy parents will "abuse" technology for selfish ends, but that doesn't diminish the value of the technology for its intended purpose. This is going to be a big seller, and I'll bet that it does in fact help many children learn to read quicker - it's all pattern recognition, but some(thing)one has to tell you what the pattern means.

@SportBilly: Of course it's not INTENDED to reaplce te parent reading, BUT with the state of things, most likely a good portion of parents will use this as an excuse to be lazy. Maybe not a majority, but a fair number.

@SportBilly: Yep, it kills me when people start railing on lazy parents when they see gadgets like this - they clearly do not have, or even interact with, actual living children. My son's LeapPad (and now Leapster) is the only way we'd ever manage to get to see our family - we can't afford four $400 plane tickets very often, so we drive, and the Leap toys will keep him happy and entertained for hours, without zoning out to DVD's. My son taught himself to read at age three with his LeapPad, too.

My daughter learned to identify her ABCs from a Leapster toy before we thought she was even capable of the feat; she just got so engrossed in popping the letters in and out that she memorized more than half of them in a few days.

Yeah, I'm firmly in Leapster's camp on this one. Kids learning in their spare time? We have happily handed over hundreds of dollars to Leapster over the years.

@afw: I'm with you there; between three Leapsters and a couple of DSes floating around in the minivan, I manage to haul the whole brood to Grandma's every other month without committing a homicide or just driving right off a cliff.

Ugh. For some reason, I have the feeling that something ilke this is what contributes to people my age (18 and OUT OF HIGHSCHOOL) not being able to read. I'm not knocking it, but I have friends whose parents relied almost entirely on technology to raise them, and....Well, my boyfriend's 9 year old sister can't read. It's a great tool for those who know how to use it, it seems. Hopefully the ones that use it WILL know how, as opposed to 'here, take this. Go get me another beer'

My 3 year old would LOVE one of these. He's at the age where having mommy read to him is SUCH a faux pas; he would prefer to read to himself. This would be an awesome way for him to retain his independence yet actually learn a word or 2...

Btw, Good luck Wilson!

I'm aware that there are parents who are actively involved in their children's cognitive development, but for every parent who cares, there are five parents who are too lazy and self-involved to spend any time with their kids, and those are the parents who dump money into this kind of crap as a way to avoid taking an active interest in their child's development.

I lived for several years with a family and their adopted toddler daughter, and I saw how they raised that girl and how involved they were in her development - which wasn't at all. She had one of those "educational" TV console deals, and rather than deal with her when she was upset or just wanted someone to pay attention to her, she was routinely plopped in front of the television. She played with books and such and would read gibberish to her stuffed animals, but her adopted parents were rarely interested in spending much time actually sitting with her and helping her learn to read.

Amazingly enough, children learned how to read before there were electronic toys to "help" them. Of course, this was back when schools weren't pressured to push kids to the next grade just to keep their statistics high, and the majority (rather than the minority) of teachers actually gave two cents about their students' learning progress.

To say that this stuff is universally great because it helps a subset of the population is like the whole "unschooling" movement - it probably works for a kid who is so interested in learning and so self-motivated that they don't need a teacher to make them sit down and read Moby Dick in an afternoon, or learn about physics through practical application. But for every kid who is that excited to learn, you have a hundred kids who would sit and watch television and eat Cheetos all day if they didn't have teachers forcing them to, you know, learn something useful.

One person mentioned how their son uses the pen to only read the hard words that he gets stuck on. How much better would it be to be reading (or whatever) in the same room as your son, so that when he hits a hard word, he can actually ask his parent about how to pronounce it and what it means, instead of having an electronic voice explain it to him? Different means to the same end, but I'd personally be more interested in the means that involves the parent directly with the child, rather than putting a battery-powered device in between them.