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Comment by mycoborea | Hacker News Reader

I strongly recommend you don’t let your toddler watch at any type of media on a screen if possible.

Based on what? My kids watch screens and they’re above grade level and do great in school. Just mindlessly banning screens is as bad as mindlessly allowing them. Parents were saying the same crap about radio in the 30s, TV in the 50s, video games in the 80s.

Surprising that most of my generation didn’t become devil worshipers since we listened to that dangerous rock and roll music. My great-grandparents were corrupted by that evil Jazz music.

A whole lot of get off my lawn but the real message should be: be a mindful and engaged parent. We could argue that kids should never eat ice cream either: but what kind of fun is that?

Not the OP, but FYI there's a body of research in the wild that suggests ties between the late 20th century fall in IQ with the rise of TV in households.

The gist of the explanation is a combination of decreased parental interaction, owing to kids learning less words when their parents aren't talking to them and hardly learning any words at all when watching TV, and the constant interruptions owing to the TV's sound and animations, which distracts toddlers as they're playing (including when they're not actively watching, like when the TV is on while a parent is ironing or cooking), leading to a decreased ability to concentrate that might ultimately be tied to an uptick in attention deficit disorder.

I'm admittedly no specialist in the matter so I can't speak for how accurate and reliable the research is, but I thought the explanation convincing enough to rule out any TV being turned on in the household while our toddler is around.

There is a difference between TV, Comics and Videogames that were all demonized in a similar way to this.

The difference is they all had a quality and decency barrier. YouTube videos are just made by random people with the absolute minimal of moderation. A kids TV show in the 90s wouldn't use an image of a woman dressed as Elsa cutting off her tongue with real scissors to try and clickbait children into watching it.

The actual video it's replaced with a gummy candy tongue, but the thumbnail it's her own tongue with real scissors and YouTube allowed this for months, it was an extremely popular video and channel.

and this is all before we get into the fact TV was consumed in the family room and tablets are solitary harder to control consumption.

There's a crisis of opinion like this in every generation. It happened with radio too.

I personally feel like the best approach is moderation for everything, but hey, people who don't watch media probably have more interesting hobbies than I do.

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