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Comment by playa06 | Hacker News Reader

Recently at the restaurant I saw a family with three kids, all with their own individual smartphones. One was a toddler barely a few months old, too young to even be able to understand how to use it, his smartphone was on a stand on the table, playing some of those coma inducing toddler videos that exist on the nightmare-ish corners of youtube.

There is a legitimate problem at hand here with our relationship with tech and how children.. are left to their own device with that stuff. On purpose, for the most part: the parents seem all too happy with the ability of those devices to make their kids shut up and stay constantly distracted. Doomscrolling habits makes for more "well behaved" children in public settings.

chatGPT is but one of the many symptoms, the root problem is that children should really have no business having unsupervised internet access.

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> […] coma inducing toddler videos […]

Otherwise known as CocoMelon.

My five year old son was watching Lankybox, that stuff is mindnumbing. I tried to control what he's able to watch, but next thing I know he's watching it again. I ended up removing Youtube, relying on PBS Kids. He protested though, PBS Kids is long format shows, and that's not stimulating enough for him.

I hope you'll manage to turn that around. My five year old (nearly six) is allowed one episode of something suitable after school, and in the weekends after his swimming lessons something longer. I suspect we've lucked out with him in this regard though. He's currently rewatching Netflix' Hilda (which is really excellent, but typically for children maybe two years older), and he is simply engrossed. It's a struggle to find something new though (especially in a quality Dutch dubbing).

We did try YouTube when he was three/four though, but quickly reduced that to hand-picked videos and selected shows on Netflix. The amount of soul-sucking crap on YouTube… Even the 3D CGI Fireman Sam series is preferable.

Try and dig a bit outside netflix; there are plenty of excellent old Dutch (or failing that, German) children's shows.

There are some (Alfred J. Kwak, obviously, which he very much enjoyed), but it's too soon for foreign language productions without dubs, and what quality Dutch stuff does exist is often hard to find. Often you'll be relegated to watching these on YouTube, cut up in several parts, placed there by novice 'archivists'. There one day, gone another.

I'd pay for a service which simply allowed me to stream anything broadcast in the Netherlands, but no such thing exists. Old stuff is too hard to licence, so they don't bother. Some pirate stuff exists, but it's harder than it should be.

We slowly resorted to letting them watch almost whatever they want, but an extremely reduced volume. On most days there is no TV at all; on days where there is its usually one small block (30-90 minutes). We disallow ipad (etc) at the dinner table, while eating out, in the car, etc, outright. It definitely took some time, but by being extremely consistent eventually it panned out. I think yes not only more difficult for some kids than others, but also depends on your kid. Young rambunctious boys are an entirely different thing than relatively chill daughters, so I try not to judge.

Other kids around + outdoor play time is the only thing I see that consistently works well all around for everyone.

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