"Limits"

No artificial limits on much of anything here. We share one computer and only 1 television has cable feed, so there are some natural limts. I was terrified of game systems and swore I'd never have one (long, long before being a parent. I called them money suckers). Eventually not having one made it that much more wanted by and endeared to my son (8.5yrs).

We bought him a playstation2 about a year ago. We got him a Nintendo DS for Christmas. I was actually pretty happy about that decision as I find the Nintendo games much less violent than the PS2 games. He recently "e-bayed" a Gamecube for himself and got quite a deal. He rents games from gamefly.com which he pays for out of his allowance.True, when he gets a new game, he emmerses himself in it. He learns all he can online about cheats and other codes. He's researching plenty! For a day or 2 he does little else. He stops on his own for a rest now and again, but he goes back to the new game after a while. But he learns so much from the games themselves. There are goals to be met. There's reading the story along the way. There's math in figuring how many widgets he needs to collect to get to the next level. There's often people managing skills needed to get different characters in the game to cooperate. It's all in how you look at what is going on.

And he does walk away on his own when he's had enough. Sometimes that may be hours, sometimes a few minutes. But because he knows they are there for him to use at any time, he has no fear that they will be taken away and no urge to soak up all he can while he can.

Same is true for television. If he doesn't want to watch, he doesn't. He turns it off more often than I do. There's no fear of not being able to watch later.Learning happens all the time. You can't stop it. You can kill the desire, but you can't stop learning. Unschooling is about changing your perspective on what learning is. Living life is learning.