The best thing from my own experience is for kids to learn to read and ENJOY reading. This exercises their minds in ways that cannot be equaled by electronics, physical toys, or anything that is available to city kids. Recommended: Harry Potter series: they are silly and unreal, but they definitely exercise the imagination, and once the kid (read: me) has reread them a few times, they also get some exercise in picking up things that do not logically fit--inconsistencies in the stories. Forget TV, plastic toys, electronic gimmicks. Get them to enjoy reading, else they will have difficulties throughout life. Take it from the person who is being paid a very good salary for training people in a big corporation: if they don't read, and enjoy reading, they can't study and learn. They need to have a vocabulary. Reading list: anything by Robert Heinlein (Wrote about twenty novels targeted at teens, plus a few targeted to adults) Harry Potter series: very good for contemporary kids. Jack London: all of them, starting with "Call of the Wild" Robert Louis Stevenson: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, many others If the kids are already good readers, start them on classics like Robinson Crusoe, Swiss Family Robinson, The Count of Monte Cristo, Dickens (simpler and easier), likewise Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Homes books). For some kids, the old Zane Grey series, for younger ones the Hardy Boys and for girls the Nancy Drew series. Also include, especially for girls who have a tendency to horse-crazy, Walter Farley, who wrote the Black Stallion series (recommendation from my wife). Give them heroes who can THINK, not ones who rely on muscle.

Please don't believe any government hype about anything to do with this. Any excuse the current (or former) government gives for putting controls on the internent is simply another method of reducing your first amendment rights. The current government has as its primarly EXPRESSED purpose to CHANGE things: one of the things it wants to change is the right of the people who can communicate to do so effectively, which means controls on the internent. They already have the right to cut down American general access to the internet, for anyone but a total nerd. Since I am not a total computer person, that means that my right to defend my ability to communicate is under threat. I use the net but I am not an expert in the means to get around governemtn edicts and methods of cutting access. Please do anything you can to put a stop to government controls on the net. It is your freedom and your communication ability that is at risk.