A while back, my friend and colleague Sascha Segan waxed rhapsodic about buying his one-year-old daughter a laptop. He says that we should raise kids to be media-fluent and that there's nothing wrong with screen time for even the youngest children. While I agree that we need to raise media-literate children who become discriminating viewers, technology users, and consumers, I think he fundamentally misjudges the cultural environment we're in. It's not as if this country is plagued by a rash of parents trashing their TVs and computers and raising their children in an Amish-style media vacuum. Quite the opposite: This is a nation of TV junkies and technology fanatics.

In most households, the TV is on for about seven hours a day. By the time the average kid graduates from high school, they will have spent 11,000 hours in school--and more than 15,000 hours watching TV. Kids under six-years of age already spend more time watching TV and playing video games then they do reading. Now, I love playing video games, but I'm kind of partial to reading, too.

I realize I'm tipping two sacred cows here. I'm discussing the negative effects of technology to tech fans on a technology blog, and I'm telling parents how to raise their kids. But I don't really care. The problems are too big to ignore. Childhood obesity, rampant consumerism, and even ADHD have been directly linked to excessive screen time. And the research that documents the negative effects of children viewing televised violence is nothing short of overwhelming.

Sascha derides the American Academy of Pediatrics for recommending children under the age of two get no screen time. Is this an outlandish recommendation? The first two years of life are critical for brain development. The University of Washington Department of Pediatrics has shown a correlation between the number of hours of television watched before age 3 and ADHD-related symptoms at age 7. If my doctor thinks that TV will get in the way of my child's ability to develop cognitively, physically, socially, and emotionally, I'm not going to dismiss it.

Maybe part of the reason Sascha and I see this differently is that we have different kids. He has an angelic one-year-old girl with nothing but possibilities before her. I have an 12-year old stepson with a MySpace page loaded with Family Guy clips who's already beaten Gears of War. And we don't even own that game. He beat it a friend's house. I've seen the future. And it isn't pretty.

Clearly, I haven't banned technology from our house, but limits are essential. Emmet can't watch TV or play video games until his homework is done. That's pretty straightforward, right? Well, he's found more than a few loopholes. How about the PC? Word, yes. MySpace, no. What about watching videos on the iPod? No, that counts as watching TV. PSP? Forget about it. He's allowed to listen to music on his PC, but the screen has to be off. Otherwise, homework time quickly becomes another shopping trip on iTunes.

Can't I blame him? Turns out, playing video games activates the basal ganglia portion of the brain, the region that releases dopamine. This is the same region of the brain that's affected by cocaine. Problem is, that release means there is less dopamine available when the child needs to perform other, less enjoyable tasks, like homework. Videos games are not like cocaine, your brain thinks they are cocaine. And if you doubt that try to take the controller out of Emmet's hands before he reaches a save point.

Bill Gates restricts his 10-year-old daughter's screen time to 45 minutes during the week and hour and a half on weekends. Granted, she goes to a school where the kids use tablet PCs every day, but still, he doing this for a reason. The limit is clearly more important than the potential gain. Not coincidentally, I am sure, Windows Vista lets you set application and Internet access for your kids from a central control panel.

Put simply, you can't rely on kids to limit their media intake. Media literacy requires more than having an off switch on the TV. It requires parents with the knowledge and will to press it. It means not just knowing what your kids are watching, but what games they're playing and what lessons are being learned. Sascha knows this, of course. But there are huge swaths of this country that don't.

Kids will master the technology on their own, far faster than their parents in most cases. As Emmet proudly told me the other day "I know how to erase my browser history, Dan, just so you know." Fortunately, he still thinks cookies are for dessert.