Apple Addiction

With much fear and trembling, the K-folks have exposed K-bao to technology. This has consisted of letting her play some Fisher-Price games on the desktop, allowing her to monkey around with K-Pop's locked Blackberry, and yes, introducing her to some "educational apps" on the iPhone.

The result? Complete mayhem in the Hu family. A kid asking for - nay, demanding - her screen time 10 - 12 times a day. We are either shaping the next Marissa Mayer or creating a little technology brat emotionally dependent on Apple products.

The K-folks' only comfort is that this appears to be a commonplace problem. K-Pop came across the following GigaOm headline the other day: I Gave My 3 Year Old an iPhone: Have I Created a Monster?

And according to a Stanford University study, 25% of iPhone users reported the phone to be "dangerously alluring" and 41% said that losing their iPhone would be "a tragedy."

In the below video, shot with K-Pop's iPhone, little K-bao chants "iPhone" no less than 8 times before resorting to guilt-tripping her Dad with appeals to natural law and principles of selflessness.

Art & Morals

We took K-bao to check out ARTifact (a children's arts school in San Francisco) this morning. K-bao had no trouble getting into their painting-on-the-sidewalk activity, snatching up a brush and proceeding to paint happily not only on the pavement but also on her shirt and pants as well as all over other kids' little sidewalk creations. Incidentally, K-bao's modus operandi with older kids is to walk up and loudly assert "Share!" - not the expression of any altruistic desire on her part but rather an unabashed guilt trip to get the target kid to give up a toy or some other desired resource. Today for example K-bao would run over, dip her brush in another kid's colors while simultaneously yelling "Share!" Stunned and unable to muster up any retorts that appealed to higher principles, the older girls would quietly let K-bao take over their paint jars. The K-folks clearly have a little work to do on the scruples.