LeapFrog My First Leap pad Review

It’s hard to hate a gizmo that keeps your kid entranced for hundreds of miles during cross-country excursions. First we moved from California to Chicago, followed a few months later with a visit to Connecticut (we have a penchant for places starting with “c”, I guess). My four-year-old had this contraption in his lap for large chunks of the trip, riveted to the chirpy tunes and goofy character voices.

It’s essentially a red, plastic lap desk with electronic innards. You click a spiral booklet in place, insert a small computer cartridge in a slot on the side, and turn it on. Tapping a large, plastic stylus shaped like a pen to various spots on the booklet’s pages will tell the LeapPad what page you’re on, what game you’d like to play, how you’re answering a question, etc.

And even though the spiral booklets and cartridges come bound in a plastic box, I defy the average hassled parent to keep track of where, exactly, you last saw the Dora cartridge or who put the Wiggles booklet in the Thomas box.

It purports to teach kids to read and do math, but don’t hold your breath. It’s no substitute for curling up with a few picture books together, and its interactivity is limited to selecting prerecorded responses. Worse, there isn’t a single booklet--at roughly $12.99 a pop—that doesn’t feature licensed characters. Am I the only parent in America still shocked, shocked that basic literacy cannot be acquired without shameless merchandising?

If you don’t want your kids noodging you about buying tie-in products for characters you can’t keep track of without a PDA, save your money and go to a library. Unless you have a few thousand miles to kill, that is.