Half of the 5-and-a-half-year-olds in Japan plays PC games

I read an article entitled "Half of the 5-and-a-half-year-olds plays PC games [jp]".

On November 21, Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare of Japan announced the results of its "6th Longitudinal Study of the Children Born in the 21th Century" and reported that half of the 5-and-a-half-year olds plays PC games.

CHONAN (my eldest son) has started playing "Nintendo DS" about 6 months ago. So he is one of those 5-and-a-half-year olds who plays PC games.

The first game he played was "Mario Kart".
Then, he started playing "Pokemon" under the influence of his friends.

For neither case did I teach him how to play, but he learned it somewhere somehow. He even managed to learn how to exchange the game cartridge which I did never teach him.

I'm impressed by the user interface of Nintendo DS which require no learning as well as the growth of my son.

These days, he enjoys visiting the Dinosaur King and Disney websites and playing Flash games (we help him until the sites are shown on his computer).

In our famly, playing games is not prohibited but the time is up to 30 minutes. He keeps the rule and that impresses me as well.

However, when it comes to playing with his friends of the kindergarten, he chooses make-believe games, not computer games. Quite interesting.

57% of the children take lessons after school or weekends. As for boys, the most popular class was swimming (23%) and for girls, music classes such as piano (25%).

CHONAN used to take swimming classes as well, but he often had runny nose and otitis media from swimming, so he quit the class and now is learning Karate.

Recently, he passed an exam and earned the orange belt. I'm happy for him since I know he has been practicing very hard.

BTW, the game he wants for this Christmas is this:

* Ancient King Dinosaur D-kids Adventure Dinoholder EX