By John Rosemond, Tribune News Service

A 4-year-old boy informed his preschool teacher – a friend of mine – that he’d broken his iPad.

“Oh!” my friend said. “What a shame. Did you drop it?”

“No,” the boy said, very matter-of-factly. “I got mad that my mom wanted me to share it with my sister, so I slammed it on the table and it broke.”

His next sentence: “Now we have two of them so I don’t have to share.”

When the teacher conveyed this to me (as an example of the devolution of parenting since she began teaching), the first thing that came to mind was a gift I received in the mid-1980s from a complete stranger. I had written a column in which I speculated that video games were addictive and shortened a child’s attention span. A few weeks later, UPS delivered a state-of-the-art Nintendo accompanied by a lengthy letter from the president of Nintendo Corporation. It took him nine pages to tell me that I was dead wrong, that video games stimulated all manner of intellectual and social skills. They are, he said, a veritable fount of marvelous benefit.

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