How to Keep Your Kids at the Keyboard

It’s the dog days of summer (what does that mean? Does the season wants its belly rubbed?) - and I tote my MacBook around from home office to hammock to client boardroom and back… all the while dodging my loafing teens and frenetic preteen fighting over access to Facebook and MSN.

I’m a good mom; I scream at my kids to Get Outside and Get Some Freaking Fresh Air Right This Instance! I mean, I have to stay attached to my keyboard; they don’t - so why would they want to? (First sign of generational gap right there.)

Websites to keep your kids busy this summer

See, if I was a really good mom, I’d be recommending websites for them to visit this summer. Such as Funology.com (science, yeah!), GamesfortheBrain.com (ooh, kids love educational play) and Seussville.com … ok wait. I am not going to slam that one - I am as big a Dr. Seuss fan as they come.

Serving up these sites and others for the anklebiters is the advice of an article at Xomba.com - and they should know. Their tagline is ‘Show and Tell Has Never Been So Rewarding,’ nicely evocative of childhood. It actually reflects their business model of users writing articles and commenting/voting and reaping 50% of Xomba’s Google AdSense revenue.

Hmm… maybe I can get some child labour happening around my house this summer (especially my 15-year-old who’s too lazy to put his shirt on and go to a job interview, and my 12-year-old who needs a job like a border collie does, but is too young. Of course, my daughter, 16, is working - the malls are open all summer long): I can get them cranking out articles on Xomba and reaping those Adsense returns!

Just think how impressed their Information Technology teachers will be come September when they write those ubitiquous “How I Spent My Summer Vacation” essays.