Amazon’s “digital pacifier” for toddlers
oligarchwatch.substack.com
oligarchwatch.substack.com
0-3 yrs old: no screens at all. No TV playing when they are in the room, even if they can only hear the sound. Refrain from using your phone too long when they are in the room with you, they need to see your face react to them to learn human interaction.
3-6: no screens used alone. No internet. Interactive content with a parent is ok, not regularly, not in the bedroom.
6-9: may discover safe internet spaces, with help from parents.
9-12: can learn to manage their screen time, protect their private life, develop critical thinking.
12+: no screens at night, talk to your kid about what they do online, more autonomy.
This is what we follow (refraining from using the phone ourselves is prolly the hardest to do), they have never watched cartoons alone, they love old point'n'click games on the PC with me, we share the mouse, and I thought they would ask for more and more screen time, they don't. They actually want to read books with parents, paint, draw, build, go outside, ride a bicycle, invite friends. Maybe we're lucky. They don't throw tantrums in their seat, they sometimes do while grocery shopping, it's difficult, but I would never use a screen to stop it.
So, I don't see how this kind of device can be useful and safe at any age. It seems designed to cause the infamous "iPad kid" syndrome or get them hooked on Amazon products even younger than before.
But there's even worse in stores today: AI assistant integrated plushies.
Although I am not sure how much it shaped my life since self reflection is quite hard.
Modern day Furbies?
These should be universal, even if some culture will first disagree and want to do things differently because they think they know better, in the end it will converge to the same, like it did for lead paint on toys, asbestos in housing, radium-dial watches, thalidomide for morning sickness for pregnant women, X-rays for shoe-fitting, etc.
Otherwise, I don't really see your point, preschoolers rarely have access to TVs where I live.
I'd be interested to know if this makes children "text-blind" and relates to increased struggles with reading and writing as they get older. It seems a theme in 6-10 year olds from teachers at the moment.
At the same time I'd never judge a parent who is using a screen. It's hard and you don't know what else they're juggling. They probably feel guilty about it as well.
Plus I have the "plank in my own eye", sometimes we let our preschooler watch videos by himself while eating or in the car. He has plenty of interactive non screen time, just...trade offs.
We also looked at kindergarten near us and apparently they use screens for a small part of the day for personalized learning modules (ahead or behind). Seems...early?
Parenting is hard, and strangers are always brutal judges of you.
Best not to concern yourself with the opinions of strangers.
I know many parents have difficult lives, but I have to say: this isn't good.
That might be what pediatricians say to YOU, or what they would give as generic aspirational goals, but frankly I think generic aspirational goals are silly.
Wouldn't no screens ever be safer at all ages if you're worried about screens? Its not like teens don't have problems with social media...
I think its important to separate recommendations from ideals.
For one, an ideal is not pragmatic and is only true "all other things being equal". It ignores trade-offs.
Second, an ideal for one is an ideal for all, but a recommendation for one is not a recommendation for all.
Do you also eat only vegetables, never smoke or drink, and go on a run for 30 minutes every day (of course same for kids as well)? Do you practice gratitude and volunteer weekly?
My point is simply that less screens is probably directionaly correct, but pushing consistent standards or recommendations is silly. Everyone is at a different level and should have different goals. We should all work on using less screens in whatever way we can, and understand how far we are from an ideal, and what damage is caused by that mismatch, but we shouldn't act like one arbitrary standard is actually magically correct and should be a global requirement.
Like sure, of course, don't let the kid just mindlessly watch TV. But removing the TV entirely from all spaces they could possibly be in is too extreme and the benefits of that are not clear other than expressing the parents' own maniacal anxiety which (in of itself) is not a good thing to teach the child.
youre gonna have a hard time convincing me that rugrats and bluey are a negative impact on development.
that said, tv for a 0-1 does feel icky. like i wouldnt recommend tossing them in a bouncer in front of a tv for hours.
The way the post is framed, it makes it seem like you have to completely remove all TVs from the child's life to be consistent with the medical literature which doesn't seem correct.
Everything in moderation; an episode a day can't be too bad, but having it running all the time, or it being the only thing they watch will have consequences.
All the time makes it a digital pacifier, it'll cause anxiety if it's ever off - this is what a lot of people already have a problem with, like, I'll pull out my phone in a quiet moment. And it being the only thing they watch limits their world view and potential.
It's like books, some people only read Harry Potter or one of the YA series and it's what they (need to?) relate everything to. A newish subreddit was opened up about that, https://www.reddit.com/r/readanotherbook/. Top post has someone claiming Harry Potter's author who shall not be named was the first author writing about classism.
Most people use password123 as password, and like using the same password on every site, so saying that's bad is a bit silly?
What kind of logic is that?
> benefits of that are not clear other than expressing the parents' own maniacal anxiety which (in of itself)
The coupling of the benefits being supposedly "not clear" while "maniacal anxiety" being absolutely certain is just classic.
That's a ridiculous false equivalence and you know it.
Choosing a poor password is nowhere near analogous to the investment and energy requirement of creating completely TV-free spaces for children.
I'm questioning whether that degree of separating is consistent with the medical literature, not whether we should "do something bad because we've always done something bad"
But that's the whole argument. It's silly because many are used to it, it's too extreme a change for people who are used to it.
If the majority of people somewhere did indeed use "Password123" everywhere and had been for decades, they'd find excuses too, one of them that it's not so bad as "Password". They might have a whole process around dealing with while not seeing the fallout.
> the investment and energy requirement of creating completely TV-free spaces for children.
Huh? You simply don't turn on the TV when the kid is there. If you want to save even more money and energy, don't get a TV.
If there is a TV at a restaurant and the kid sees it, do you tell them to turn it off for you?
If you walk by the electronics section at a walmart do you demand the workers turn off all the TVs before you pass by?
Do you scout every location prior to visiting to make sure you avoid TVs at all costs?
My point is the framing of kid cannot even _hear_ the TV without ruining the child is ridiculous.
Today we raise our kids the similarly: they watched some Peppa Pig and later Paw Patrol _very_ occasionally (the older one maybe starting at 3, the younger starting at 2), now (kids 6 and 8) they sometimes watch an episode of something, or we watch a movie together. Sometimes they can check out Lego sets online, or use the school-provided learning website (Anton).
The kids also have excellent detail memory and observation skills, great imagination (they tell us many stories and play with Lego in very unintended ways), very good language vocabulary and generally fly through school. Again: probably not a coincidence (even though some of it may be inherited IQ). No glasses needed so far.
I'm not saying everybody needs to do it like this exactly, but I'm happy with many decisions.
I have no idea what happened with regards to TV usage between age 0-3 though, lol. But I know it wasn't on in the background - watching TV was and remains an active activity. I could never understand why some people have a TV show on in the background while they do other things, but then I usually have music playing.
To a kid, playing games from the 1980s off a floppy disk is not a significantly difficult experience than using the very latest technology, but I suspect the former is far better for their developing brains.
Meanwhile, you can get them to learn how to type on the keyboard and learn the basics of needing to type in commands to make the computer do something, which is a lifelong skill - tapping icons on a tablet is not.
just a regular PC with keyboard mouse monitor and the unit.
edit: maybe a DVD unit for reading AND writing disks.
After a while, expose them to programming through AMOS or Blitz Basic.
... which gets ever more hard to provide, sadly. Many people can't really afford an appropriately sized home - but in contrast to "earlier" times, can't send the kids outdoors as a replacement either as they're unsafe due to car-centric culture, the death of third spaces and, in the US, gun and other violence.
I 3D printed a film development tank, and bought some "glassware" at a thrift shop to mix things up. The first couple rolls I did, I put a towel tightly over the window and closed the door and used my bathroom as a darkroom. I've since gotten one of those little "dark bags".
You still technically need a real fixer, but B&W fixer isn't all that bad compared to the whole slew of chemicals needed for color processing. I'm using the powdered Kodak Professional fixer.
Here's some of the shots off my first roll (Ilford HP5 shot on an Olympus Pen EE2) https://postimg.cc/gallery/fL5HvXV This was my first time using the film scanner I got, and I had the settings ALL wrong, they're too bright and too low contrast. I've since figured it out and scans look way better now, I just don't have any of those on my work computer.
I can't help with the film costs, though...
but thing is, it was not a whole PC. it was just the keyboard...
i played with that keyboard for 1 year before my family could afford to buy the rest of the PC.
in that year i learned the position of every key and would show off to friends how i can find any key, with my eyes closed.
This was before computers were common.
A pre-millennial computing experience would have the benefit of not having that sort of bullshit. For the patience-building experience it could be real floppies, but putting the games in an emulator is also an option. I guess Windows 11's "Install Copilot Edge OneDrive 365? [Yes/Maybe later]" popups means you'll have to go Linux...
It was easier with the older one as phones and tablets were not as pervasive so I can understand it has become harder to do.
I also think another thing that benefitted them greatly was that we did not have a TV ( https://pietersz.co.uk/2008/05/i-have-no-tv/ )
I also thing another issue is that parents are also addicted to devices so pay less attention to children. its not the only issue, but it makes it worse. It was epitomised for me by a woman who, when her son refused to put down his tablet on a train trip, took a photo of him on it and posted it to FB for advice.
The Amazon product is fine. It's really a question of how often they use it, and how early. I agree that any screens before 2 risks screwing up a human's idea of what's real.
But I still don't like the idea of this tablet at all, for various reasons, mainly screen time, developmental impact, subscription & ads and vendor lock-in.
Edit: yes, I have children. They don't think they have enough screentime and we think they have too much. Probably means it's about right.
No.
I grew up at a time, were people had no tablets available, guess what? We did not need bright light tablets when we were 4,5 or 6 to sit in a Restaurant.
We didn't need 'tablet time'.
The message is very easy: The more time and energy you can give to your kids, the better off they will be.
In retrospect, i watched too much television. I would have loved it if my parents would have shown me more things, motivated me more, trained with me etc.
Am I bad now? No. Do I think my parents were bad parents? No. Avg perhaps but not good.
Its your decision at the end of the day how you handle your kids as long as its not legally neglect. But don't think that others can't determine if a table is a shitty idea or not. And i don't takl about the 'special' events like traveling to some 1-4h distance or whatever, i talk about daily live the thing which engrains neural pattern into your kids.
Everyone is entitled to their spirited opinions and advice, parent or not, but you’ll lack some mutual understanding or connection of a real lived experience to someone that is a parent until you actually become a parent yourself.
I know who i am today, i know who i could have been if my parents did certain things different and better.
As to "The more time and energy you can give to your kids, the better off they will be.". That is very simplistic and like most things is more complicated than you first think. Children get used to being entertained, be it by a tablet or a parent. There is a downside to both, in that it is also good for a child to be able to entertain themselves and comfortable by themself. (Tablets & TVs aren't a child entertaining themselves.) From my personal experience, intensive parenting where attention is maximized on the child isn't healthy for either parent or child.
All this to say that simplistic takes tend to fall apart once they meet the complex variety of reality.
i had to learn certain aspects of life after it.
"The more time and energy you can give to your kids, the better off they will be." -> this wasn't meant to babysit them, but also pushing them to go to some sports thing every week etc.
But still, I do think, even if you have to (AI might change that though) sit in front of screens, if yo udon't put certain behaviours into a kid, it will be a lot harder for them to do it by themselves.
I also do not think at all, that a kid with 4 needs to watch television more than half an hour a week if even. Then the question is also educational vs. entertaining.
I do understand were it comes from, but often enough, its more used as "ah others are doing this too, its soooo exhaustive etc. etc." but you won't see how the person grows than a lot later in life.
There are people who teach their kids disciipline, mental stability, social etc. They are all the successful people not commenting on hn, watching tiktok, etc. because they are a lot more busy with their lifes.
I'm still successful, but my life would be better/easier if my parents were better in being parents.
- how many kids do you have
- do they have disabilities
- do they go to daycare (aka how many hours are you directly responsible for them)
- do you pay for babysitting or have family nearby that can do that duty (aka how many hours are you directly responsible for them)
- what type of environment do you live in (can you let them run outside)
- do you do 100% of your cooking, cleaning, etc
- etc
In other words, there are so many factors at play here, but all the vitriol and high horse behavior typically doesn’t talk about that. In many ways, raising kids is harder than in the past, due to smaller and disconnected families, 2 working parents, fear/panic of letting kids roam outside, etc. Much of this is a societal failure.
That's probably true, but kids want a lot of things they shouldn't have. I'm sure I would have loved to have a real phone as a toddler, but my sister and I got a lot of mileage out of our Fisher Price phone, making lots of pretend calls, which was probably better for our developing brains than a real phone.
I was promised a PC at around 11 years. I think for months (or even more than a year) I fantasized about, what I could do with it. Read some books, that I had access to. Understood practically nothing, but that didn't stop me from dreaming about the bright future. The book might have been "Amiga E programming reference" and it had two chapters dedicated to the blitter and sprite programming. I reread those chapters many times, trying to imagine how to make a simple game with it.
The promised PC came, but it was a work decommissioned 486 at the time, when everyone else was upgrading to Pentiums 200 to play the latest Lara Croft. My sister was bummed out that no software from friends worked on it.
I somehow was able to make a very simple arkanoid game anyway, in C and OpenGL software renderer. Pretty sure, that the main reason I managed to do anything, was all the time spent expecting the PC and imagining possibilities.
The payoff of consistency is worth it. It buys you a sustainable pattern, which is golden.
What the f? how about 4 or 5? They can listen to audiobooks in the car
Im 40, or tv was not in 'the living room'. Just because there are families who have it even running as background noise, doesn't make it normal.
Its also a poorness indicator though
Said imagination died for the most part at some point in the past 30 years but I remember it well enough.
With a second it's practically impossible. We'd need extra childcare (and more floorspace where we live!) to trap him in a different room while the first is watching TV. Taking TV away from the first would be very hard (you're right that it's hard to withdraw once it's routine) but also not something I'd want anyway.
I'm not convinced that it necessarily expands out once it has a foothold. We have a pretty well defined TV time (before dinner) and it's easy to say "yes you can watch that show ... when it's next TV time".
When kids are older (maybe 4+), they also really enjoy listening to audio books (I'd try to avoid anything based on TV shows though, they are quite terrible and obviously not designed for the listening medium). This also works great for car trips.
(There seems to be a literacy crisis happening in real time right now because kids grow up with less reading/writing and more viewing/listening/recording than preceding generations)
The other problem is how busy people are - how many people can genuinely say nowadays that they're a full-time parent? Everyone I know (which, granted, isn't many) have both parents working part-time, so their kids go between one or the other parent, grandparents and day care. But the ideal would be that one parent stays at home, takes care of the household and is present and able to give their children attention when they need it.
But if you're a parent that just came home from work and needs to do housework, then it's very tempting to be able to leave the kids to their own devices. And sure, that doesn't need to be devices per se, but it is a pacifier of sorts.
But this is what the powers that be don't want, because one parent not working is not optimal for the economy.
Giving serious Black Mirror vibes with that. Specifically Common People https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_People_(Black_Mirror)
Day to day, no access to a tablet or whatever. TV time In the mornings at weekends so we can get a bit of sleep (sometimes a bit in the evening at weekend while we cook). No TV through week. If we do watch at other times, it’s all of us watching a movie or Gladiators or whatever together as a group activity.
Flights are the only time for us she gets extended tablet use. A stack of hours in isolation 4-6 times a year isn’t going to do any real harm. Putting babies and toddlers in front of tablet / coco melon on tv for a couple of hours a day all day every day will.
Going a step further, We’ve got friends who let their similar aged child free roam of YouTube. That pushes all kinds of dark things…
Conversely, I get that we have a large house with garden, lots of toys, not great but OK family support, and jobs that aren’t sucking it out of us energy wise. I imagine many have a much tougher time and are in need of respite too.
She’s allowed to watch YouTube kids or Netflix whenever she wants, or to play Minecraft or Mario or whatever on the switch.
The upshot is that there’s no desperation, no begging, and self-moderation of consumption. She’ll watch a video about planetary formation for 20 minutes, or a Minecraft tutorial, and then she’s bored of that, off to go make art, or play outside, or have a tea party, whatever.
One rule that’s cast iron is never at the table - we go out for dinner, she’s bored and shitkicking, she gets a pen and paper. She reads, she writes, does arithmetic, and she’s empathetic and inquisitive. Couldn’t ask for more.
Once in a while she’ll decide that today she wants to lounge on the sofa and binge on Bluey, and that’s fine - it’s never a permanent state of being.
THe media she consumes is designed by adults to make it addictive.
She can't controll it, you can.
This is a shitty shitty advice. It might work for you right now, it might work due to her surroundings right now but man wtf.
I literally said above that she has developed excellent self control and a take-it-or-leave it attitude.
Her surroundings right now? What do you know about them?
Anyway. I wasn’t even giving advice, I was just saying what worked for me and her.
You seem to have signed up to HN to pick fights and piss people off, looking at your comments.
Someone, flag this dweeb.
As I brought it up in my point I made: Social Media was made by adults to be addictive.
Alone the fact, that you think that a 4 year old should be able to "binge on Bluey" is borderline.
Good for you if it works, but don't be pissed when others chime in.
And i'm commenting for the same reasons as you do: for discussions and sharing opinions. Go ahead tell me why my comments are bad. I'm not picking any fights and i'm not pissing at people, i ARGUE. For Disucssions sake.
Do you really think my comment to your parenting will affect your parenting? no.
I can't predict what will happen to your kid specifically because everyone's different; I hope for her sake she won't change this behaviour, but I'm fairly sure in a few years you'll think back on this time.
(ours is 18, attention span and emotional regulation are shot and he's not even the worst of his generation)
It is very clear for many children that allowing them to gorge themselves on TV (or whatever) will not result in them self regulating.
The abundance technique wouldn’t work so well with my Labrador…..
But in moderation, it would be pretty difficult for someone to convince me that showing my toddler Mr Rogers was bad for him just because it is on a screen. There are things that the show Mr Rogers can do that no book or toy can do. It can show a narrated video of a real factory that makes crayons that enthralled my kid and boosted his imagination which translated directly into play time. It can show a real jazz band and have the members talk about how their instruments work (and we can hear them). It can show adult dynamics between non-authority figures which is rare in today’s world. Or any number of things like this.
I would be interested to hear why this is wrong or bad, and what a universally superior option would be that should be used in place of it. I see diversity of experience (even an experience in separate mediums) as important. 1 part coloring and 1 part Mr Rogers easily beats 2 parts coloring in my mind.
Bheem, cory carson, rogers, Pixar, etc is like unquestionably to lead to less degenerate behavior than something like cocomelon (though I get some pushback on shutdowns for those too, I get the same pushback on any other toy).
In games, the equivalent would be social spaces (minecraft, Fortnite) and competitive multiplayer; they can be consumed for far longer than they hold any value. But I fully intend to let them play paper Mario, pikmin, puzzle games, point and clicks, etc.
It’s mentally lazy to throw out the baby with the bathwater
I also put a lot of weight into socializing around it - if my 2 kids are playing a game on the ipad together where they have to negotiate and compromise about what is going to happen, who is doing what, when they have to take turns - that's a better use of their time than binge watching disney. (same goes for adults, I believe).
Also to be fair, this is where we've gotten as 5-10 year olds, was always limited+supervised when they were toddlers.
I'd guess any parent who is already planning on giving their kid a tablet would get this but any parent who is against it will not? I'm not sure this product in isolation increases the number of tablet viewing toddlers.
Our child has maybe 1 hour of tv a week, but if someone sees them only on a plane, they would guess it’s an iPad kid.
There are any number of alternatives that don’t involve a screen.
colouring in / drawing great, but same thing, 15-20mn
construction games are great but they need to be carried about, they require space and there are parts you can lose
in places that aren't adapted for children (e.g. in an airplane or train), a tablet can be a life saver. you keep them busy/playing for an hour or so, then give them their digital crack for an hour, rinse and repeat. audio books are a good compromise
Teach them to read young, buy books that are active, etc. My kids could read for a lot longer by that age, and so could I.
> in places that aren't adapted for children (e.g. in an airplane or train), a tablet can be a life saver
Talk to them, play games with them....
I loved spending time with my kids, and now they are grown up I am very glad I did.
The big one (5) has a camera, we also play guessing games (like the classic "animal, vegetable, or mineral" but usually specific to their interests such as animal, instrument, etc).
They both like books and will sit with them for upto an hour uninterrupted despite the younger one's inability to read.
After that, a switch, or a heavily curated selection of videos might be available.
I think screens are fine in moderation, almost all parents do it, but it's far from the only option.
You could teach them to read. My mother taught me to read when I was four before I went to school at five.
> in places that aren't adapted for children (e.g. in an airplane or train), a tablet can be a life saver. you keep them busy/playing for an hour or so, then give them their digital crack for an hour, rinse and repeat. audio books are a good compromise
Boredom is not fatal and in small doses is a good thing for creativity. Children survived and thrived perfectly well on long train journeys for a hundred and fifty years before digital crack.
This only works for particularly gifted kids.
Of course it is true. I went to restaurants, cafes, recitals et al and I was expected to sit and be quiet without so much as a toy or a colouring-in book. Did it make me a better child, who grew into a better adult? No idea. Does my penchant for daydreaming and drifting out of the moment stem from it? Again, no idea.
I don't mind the choices that parents make, I do tend to object to the narrative of there being no other way.
Probably not, but it just adds another measure of normalization for something all the evidence suggests is insidiously harmful to the development of a young brain.
Mine were never exposed to tablets and consumption based technology until they went to university when they were given an iPad and apple pencil. One science grad and one still studying at top tier universities, no cognitive issues or addiction. Their peers, not so much as since the advent of the iPad they were given an unrestricted device to stare at.
So I'm allowed to complain, and then some :). Screens are horrible especially when they come attached to a device made to be addictive, like an Amazon tablet.
But kids don't raise themselves no matter how "easy" they are. Parents have to make unpopular decisions that the kids will benefit from and maybe even understand when they're older. Those decisions suck the life out of you because the kid "hates" you for it, and you have to fill the void with something else that takes more parental effort. Sometimes maybe it's impossible to avoid "the screen" because of some special family situation. But at "3+" these are exceptional situations, don't treat them like the baseline.
The consequences of addiction from such a young age to screens (or sugar, junk food and every other mistake parents make to make their own lives easier in the moment) are documented and lifelong. As a parent you won't escape them, you'll live them through your child's life. Might as well take the hit for them now, even if it costs you. It doesn't get easier anyway, a pre-teen with no phone surrounded by friends who have one is no joke.
We've had an absolutely-zero-screens policy for our almost-3-year-old (and will have the same for his baby sister) and I think it's made things much easier than if he had limited access. It's simply Not An Option, so we as parents and he as a child manage to find other interesting things to do. Currently he's really into listening to music on a 35-year-old Fisher Price cassette player, scooting a toy garbage truck around, and thumbing through books.
Plane rides are difficult (and he's had many) but so far we have gotten through them with patience, lots of snacks, and a new toy or two.
Yeah sometimes this turns into an emotional outburst. So what? She's a toddler sometimes the emotional outburst just happens because the sofa looked at her wrong.
It seems to make the special cases where she is allowed the screen for longer (long car/van rides for example) work better.
Yes but those kids weren't at real risk of having their minds completely subverted by for-profit organizations.
Meanwhile, the majority of parents care deeply and are doing their best at a difficult charge. They instill a grounding in contemporary consensual morals, which is all they have ever been able to do. The idea that they have, en masse, "abdicated a sacred duty" is cheap. I'll stipulate that tablets are bad. I don't agree that morals peaked in some edenic past.
I mean, peak father-son time was sending the boys down the mines with their dads. I'm not convinced that screen time is worse.
I regret the industrial revolution as much as the next crunchy hipster, but finding a nice stick to beat it with is not going to raise the floor. Whatever dogma you fancy, the groups you most want to ram it into will never even hear it. Parents who use tablets as pacifiers so they can smoke meth or watch telly are not going to change because you shout at them about the arts and crafts movement. Neither are parents working two jobs without support networks. If you're right, you're pointlessly right.
Usually my kids are sitting quietly at the table and playing with their little cars or whatever while some kid is melting down that he ran out of roblox or his game isn't working.
I've literally seen kids that are 9 or 10 act this way in public! Like little babies!
I downloaded every episode of Mr. Rogers and serve them from Plex. On one hand it does create moments where you have to limit your kids and that creates an outsized emotional response, but it also allows me the chance to watch the episodes too (as they aren’t on only at “kid show” times).
I appreciate the chance to show interest in something that they are interested in.
Also, as I have watched so many Mr Rogers episodes I know that sometimes you have to find ways to deal with the mad that you feel[0], so I don’t mind helping work through emotions when we don’t agree that it’s time to stop.
0: https://www.misterrogers.org/videos/what-to-you-do-with-the-...
Twenty years ago it was easier to be a good parent.
As an aside I worked in a drug users support center as an IT admin for a few months in my 20's, I don't feel like I have any insight into actual crack, other then Ewan McGregor said it best when he says choose life.
It has a visual indicator (sun going down) that tells them how long they have remaining and that works quite well to remove any discussions (well… screaming and shouting)
https://github.com/sandermvanvliet/tellybox
As others have said in adjacent threads, kids are hard, every situation is different.
Do start hoarding the better shows and series you know.
As one of them, no, not really.
I looked hard into the question but all the litterature I got was a mix of "I'll give you candy if you do X" experiments that beg the obvious "what if the kid doesn't want the candy for whatever reason ?", including their mood while doing the experiment. And this goes on for every detail of the experiments.
And the rest was philosophical and hypothetical "it's not like the olden days" style of conservatism, mixed with "this time it's different" to try to barrage criticism.
Testing on kids is just hard, so coming up with good experiments is in itself a PITA. I wish people would recognize that and take the research with shovels of salt (and I don't see misleading research as better than nothing).
Buying a kindle for my kid has been a decision that still pays dividends, I would have kicked myself if I refused it on social pressure.
Nowadays I think I wouldn't mind audio and video, especially audiobooks and channels like those on Nebula. YouTube is a cesspool while also hosting the most interesting content, running something like Newpipe on a kid's tablet with specific channels locked on would also interesting IMHO.
> addictive games
The main issue for me is the lack of management options. ScreenTime is half-assed, what we have on Nintendo's Switch is a bit better, I'd actually spend time to deal with all the settings and rule system if it was available in a very granular way. We're already spending the same amount looking after other stuff.
Fair enough. I guess ignoring large swathes of industry research and government warnings must be a good tradeoff for an easier life.
The first result that isn't a guideline or call to action when I search "preschool children screen time research"
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S074937972...
On the recruitment:
> Note: Eligible families were recruited primarily through paid social media advertisement (83%) as well as other online sources (6%) and word-of-mouth/other (11%).
So most of this experiment was done with families who click ads on Facebook/Instagram. The results are relevant for that specific public, but tougher to expand to other families and environments.
That's one specific study, but I really read a lot, and this kind of bias is common. Perhaps because they need families that are stressed about screen time in the first place ?
I have not come across any research saying ebook readers are bad. They are very different from general purpose tablets.
My local library is almost as much a homeless support center as a library, it's its own cultural experience, but we still go.
The reality of it though: librarians have their lives and can't man libraries 24/7. Scheduling regular visits is fine if the kid has a reading routine, basically the "1 book a week" kind of quota.
I know some people do it, to my family it's a lot easier to me to search together online the very moment an interest is expressed, buy it on the spot and the kid can start reading immediately. There's no discipline, but it also makes books and documentaries a lot more familiar and casual.
Some of them think its safe, others think the risk is overblown, and a lot just don't want to deal with their kid having a shit fit.
In the UK, unless you are adopting a kid with needs, you will not get any parenting training. so you're on your own on how to deal with children. TV was safe when I was a kid, and younger parents who grew up with digital TV also had safe watching, why would youtube kids be any different?
With my kids (and yes this is a boast, I'm middle class, this is how we assert dominance) I was lucky enough to be able to enforce time limits of TV/netflix etc. They also aren't allowed youtube on their own, so never got onto the conversion ladder from crap to exploitative crap.
crucially they don't have tablets/phones whilst bored. TV is a treat, so boredom requires them to sit there and fucking day dream like the rest of us.
> TV was safe when I was a kid,
Safe in some ways, but still harmful. it was passive and a substitute for things that helped you develop. A lot of parents (mine included) limited TV for just this reason.
> TV is a treat, so boredom requires them to sit there and fucking day dream like the rest of us.
Exactly this - one of the things I had in mind with regard to TV being harmful. Even in the days when we had three or four broadcast channels and that was it!
> I'm middle class
Worth noting that the British and American definitions of middle class are quite different.
This is a change that has accelerated in the last 25 years, and we do all need to do something about it. I suspect the first step is making housing mor affordable, which means building more homes. (both "private" and social, [council housing] we can't just cater to one part of the market.)
> Worth noting that the British and American definitions of middle class are quite different.
hooooboy yes.
Tolerance of tablet use is a spectrum ranging from the aggressively Luddite tech elite shielding their children from their own creation all the way to the 6-year-old posted up in the basin of a grocery cart dual-wielding their ruggedized tablet running Minecraft and their parents’ phone cycling through YouTube slop.
In my experience, most people fall somewhere in the middle, i.e. “we’re on our 4th hour in coach class, I’m tired of pretending this animal-themed card game is fun, and I know this isn’t development-maxing right now but we’re gonna do it for an hour to preserve our sanity and that of those around us”.
That being said, the problem with these ads is that they normalize tablet use as something that’s just another (even desirable!) part of everyday life, not a tool of last resort.
Some of the kids in my neighborhood derisively called another kid a "tablet kid" because he'd rather stay inside on his tablet than go outside in the summer and play.
Personally, tablet time is reserved for airplanes and trains. We also have a color eink android tablet that is hooked up to Libby and isn't used for anything else but reading.
TV screen time is limited to watching shows together with one of us, or when my son is sick.
Video/computer games are always played together.
Same goes for movies, movies are always co-watched, we sit through the movie, pause and discuss what is going on, I'll ask about why people are doing certain things, what emotions different characters are having in a scene, and so forth.
Christ, at least let the kid think about it on his own and ask questions later! Don't know about your kid, but I don't know ANY person, at any age, that would not feel like they're enduring an insufferable school class with behaviour like this.
Depends on the age of the kid. Started doing this when my son was 3, it helped him learn lots of words for different emotions and it helped him learn to use words to describe other's emotions.
Now that he is older I do this less, it depends on what we are watching though.
Active listening to stories, and actively engaging with media, is a learned skill. It isn't automatic.
I read to him together, a lot, and he'll stop and ask me questions about what is happening in the book. When I'm reading to him and other kids at the same time, other kids will notice him asking questions and then realize they can also ask questions, and pretty soon I am answering more and more questions about what is going on.
Today we're still doing the same thing, only the drugs hit is being delivered by other means.
There are lots of wildly profitable enterprises that we regulate or make illegal.
If everyone else is selling boiled orphan elixir, you'd be leaving money on the table not to boil yourself some orphans. But maybe we decide that boiling orphans isn't an industry we want as a society, and legislate consequences for doing so.
And in the same way we have decided that the screens for children IS an industry we want as a society.
Just because we've accepted industrialized evil, doesn't make it not evil. Amazon is destroying lives here.
I'm sure someone's thinking that, and it's a bullshit rationalization. Don't turn yourself into a villain because you think someone else might beat you to it.
Also, if true, it's a stark indictment of capitalism, and how it pushes people towards malign and harmful activities.
The biggest issue with capitalism is that it rewards the people with no moral compass with power. In a broken system like this, no change will ever come unless people start to decide to do something about it. This comes in two forms: replacing the system, and reforming the system. Both of these require influence. The more influence a person has, the more change they can enact. And let's face if, we live in a system where money can directly be converted to power and influence (see our elections and politics as a whole). To make real changes you have to play the game, and unfortunately there are a lot more evil people playing the game than good. To try to skew that ratio in the right direction a little bit is a good idea in my books.
And you do that by developing, building, and marketing, a tablet for toddlers?
I don't think any of what you say makes sense, if you think about it for even a little bit:
1. Even an individual at the top of capitalism doesn't have the right kind of influence to "replace or reform it."
2. Even if one could amass that kind of influence for that goal, the path to get there through "winning at capitalism" would probably corrupt the person before they had any influence to wield.
3. And even if you could get that high without being corrupted, there's no guarantee. Most of the people trying will end the game accomplishing nothing better slinging cancer-sticks and brain-rot for babies.
4. The actual path towards fixing it may not be an "only I can fix it" collaborationist arrogance. It could be letting it get worse and putting your efforts into highlighting those contradictions to motivate more robust collective action.
5. etc.
Technology is not linear. There are many paths it can take.
Your contributions are somewhat unique. To a certain degree, if you don't make it, no one will.
(Continue down below for an amusing rant - trigger warning maybe?)
Now it’s just part of insatiable corporate greed and the current sad reality.
I wonder if Zuck lets his girls use Instagram all day long or if Andy would gift his own toddler (if he had another one) this beautiful tablet. Probably not, he’d have a full time nanny to keep the kid busy.
Alas, these folks are the symptoms and the real problem is systemic folks. Companies are chasing targets to please…drumroll…the shareholders. Yes, each one of us holding index funds are also culpable. It’s a SNAFU. We’ve been sucked whole into the system and escape is hard (especially with the newly proposed Dell bank account for kids that can only be used to invest in stocks).
The ol' "The real evil overlord is just you and me" retort is a bit undermined by the existence of products like this one that actively constrain people's actions and pressure them to perpetuate the system. Like, who gave the order to design that product?
It's also not true. "Companies" on their own don't do anything. The operational decisions are made by CEOs and board members who do have a lot of leeway to decide how they want - and often do have an ideology they follow.
Shareholders are also not "you and me" in the common case - especially not with index funds, where you have zero agency to influence the market even despite being a shareholder on paper.
Significant amounts of shares are held by wealthy individuals or other companies with humans at the top - people who are in the same social group (or often the same individuals) as those in the C-suite.
At the level of wealth concentration we are in, I think talking about the "billionaire class" is more constructive than talking about "shareholders" and then noticing full of surprise that we all are shareholders.
Nobody external gave a directive to build this. But if people buy it en masse, they will continue to invest in it. If not they will sunset it.
Its success or failure rests on consumers, the same people responsible for parenting their children well.
We’ve been doing that for a while now. That led us precisely to this point where we now have MORE billionaires than ever before, and even the first trillionare.
Logic would dictate that you can’t expect different results by trying the same things over and over again.
The billionaire problem is a symptom of the system. The system was designed to enrich corporations. Socialism is at odds with capitalism.
Until there’s a reasonable discourse and agreement that capitalism does not work at a societal level if we only ever optimize for making money, the ‘people’ will remain an afterthought.
401ks are the perfect example of this tension. On one end, there is recognition that companies should contribute to an individual’s retirement plans. On the other hand, the decision to invest and grow the money is left entirely to the individual - irrespective of their aptitude. How is this equitable?
IMO - at the core lies this thinking - the state does not guarantee anything to people, it only provides the raw materials, then folks are on their own. May the best man/woman win! This is capitalism (capitalistic?) thinking applied to people.
Yes, I am greatly simplifying the reality to try and capture the gist as I see it.
Technology is harmful, starting from fire and farming. So what?
I don't understand the argument here. 100 Years ago they were abused more, but last year they were abused less. So increasing the dosage of the abuse is ok as long as it doesn't exceed your random benchmark of 100 years ago?
All completely bogus. You already know it's bogus because it's based on the science of psychology. One of the most dismal sciences there are.
2. (and this is really the most important part) literally every claim in your list was later refuted by... wait for it... better data. So, again for the cheap seats, data plz.
In 1962, there were allegations that Marx fathered a son, Freddy, out of wedlock by his housekeeper, Helene Demuth, but the claim is disputed for lack of documented evidence.
Amazon doing it will make it really horrible.
Unless this is 100 open source and ad/telemetry free? Right..
My guess: there are a lot more narcissists and sociopaths out there than you'd guess, and they bully the rest into submission.
Every day I see a celebrity in an ad for gambling and they all have the same defence "well, if people choose to gamble if they have a problem, then that's on them". Everyone knows it will destroy lives. But they say "that's on them for buying what I'm selling".
People are walking around perpetuating the moral compass of a heroin dealer like it's normal. You are responsible for your mark on the world and your fellow human beings. Yes, even if you only did the bad thing to get the money.
Some things are difficult to regulate, even as we know they are harmful and difficult to control for adults due to their addictive nature.
You don't have to think about it very hard to realize that kids, who have not yet learned to emotionally regulate themselves, will be even more vulnerable to these things if we push it on them.
For the record I think the gin industry should in fact be regulated from marketing their product as a pacificer for kids. I find it very difficult to believe that you don't.
More people need to be talking about this. The children of parents who abdicate their responsibilities of parenting are going to become the adults we deal with on a daily basis. I think the scope of the issue is not perceptible until you get to know how much damage a person with all the power can bring onto their child. That kind of thing is lifelong and not everyone can afford the therapy you will end up needing.
It shocks me that even the nicest parents I know - on the surface - still give their children phones.
This is why I see the drive for child safety regulation as an unspoken admission that the problems of an individual parent are falsely seen as insurmountable, so people start pointing fingers at whoever is in the vicinity, when in reality the parent was the one responsible for choosing their own fights by purposefully exposing their child to the modern Internet. Parenting has existed for thousands of years, social media for just 20. This is a solvable problem but parents have to change their behavior. When the majority of childhood is spent with one's family, there is no other solution.
If you take these into consideration then it makes sense why one would make such choice. Whether they are aware of building an evil device is irrelevant at this point -- they're making best choice for themselves and their family. Employers love employees who follows orders so they'll craft environment where only those kinds of employees would survive.
IMO this isn't really the problem between employers and employees. They are doing what the system incentivizes them. It's the regulator's role to govern to protect individuals.
The irony is U.S. allows lobbying and SuperPAC which essentially makes the system in favor of those with money.
There should be outrage at both, but woefully it seems only a fraction of it trancends a company label.
People like Jeff Bezos and Andy Jassy who already have more money than they could ever need but still feel compelled to cause others to suffer in order for them to make even more money likely have some other kind of mental sickness. Either some form of pathological greed that causes them to never be satisfied with what they have and obsess over hoarding, or something that causes them to derive some sort of sick pleasure from causing suffering.
Unless/until they can treated our world would be better off if we locked these kinds of people up to keep the rest of us safe from them, but right now those with enough money can get away with just about anything which only further emboldens them. They can bribe law makers to prevent regulations that would stop them from releasing harmful products and services. They can hide behind corporate shields. Hopefully we find a way to hold them accountable for the harms they cause soon because they're never going to stop hurting us, or our children.
"centering around the ambitious billionaire Isaac Flint who conceives a nefarious plan to monopolize the Earth's air supply. "
I'm biased but I feel like our kids are much more imaginative than others their age. They make more eye contact, have more original thoughts, and are much easier to feed because they don't demand to be on their tablet the whole time. Our 6 month old has Down Syndrome so we regularly have nurses coming to our home. They tell us all the time how much more imaginative our boys are than other kids their age.
Seems extremely strict.
>3-6
Makes sense to me.
>6-9 yrs old
Seems naive. There's no "internet safe zone" where a cess pit is not a query away. (in the case of algorithmic feeds, the cess pit comes to you automatically!)
>9-12 yrs old
A gateway drug to a lifelong addiction, encouraged by all of society to include teachers at school.
>12
Probably still too lax given that 12 is when boys discover pornography.
My 7yo kid, on the other hand, was watching hours' worth of mindless youtubers playing various forms of scripted hide and seek, and that we had to quash.
"Screen time" can cover an extremely wide range of spectrum from turning you into a lobotomized zombie -- to filling your head with all sorts of understanding and curiosity and wonderment. It is what you make of it.
Other time: We watch a family movie. Sometimes it just nice to watch a movie and one of my favorite times with my parents was when we were watching a nice movie together. Laughing together, finding odd things in the scences, etc.
I recently watched Toy Story 5 on a long flight. I almost felt it should come with a trigger warning - I thought it was a spot on, brilliant yet inherently depressing commentary on our current relationship with tech.
(Minor spoiler alert) One of my favorite scenes was when a slew of toys were running through a house with a family inside. Normally in the Toy Story world when a human see the toys they need to "play dead", but since all the humans were glued to their screens they could run by unimpeded.
It's all right here. Just add kid.
And they have them, like cheap Lenovos and whatnot.
An almost verbatim line from Toy Story. Incredible. Only the main character was quite a bit older than 3.
https://www.teaching.com.au/product/rechargeable-bee-bot
These were a rite of passage here in Australia for any kid who showed an interest in maths or computers.
I would have loved this as a kid!
Yeah, that's the crux of the problem. The goal of parenting is not to keep your kids quiet and calm. That's nice to have, and as someone with a toddler myself I get the desire for it sometimes.
The goal of parenting is to raise a healthy human being. Managing kids as problems to be solved instead caring for them as people to be nourished (not just physically with food, but emotionally and mentally) hardcore misses the mark on a fundamental level, in ways that harm your child directly and society more generally (since it's common for children to internalize and repeat their parents' patterns of behavior).
Yeah sometimes you want your kid to not scream the whole time in the car or on a 6 hour flight where everyone will hate you. My 4 year old niece once screamed for the entirety of a 30 minute car ride because she didn't like what color socks she was wearing, you can't talk yourself out of these absurd situations sometimes and distractions help. I'd love to give a book in these situations, but half the time it just gets thrown at your head.
Why does no one say "parents need more time and space" or "parents need help making effective choices in a world that constantly demands more of them" everyone loves crawling out of the woodwork to tell you how horrible you are.
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/aug/16/germany-childr...
kids also roamed on their own quite a lot more with other kids
The dual-income household expectation and collapsing middle-class (lost share of productivity) would be the most to blame from my perspective... there's also a major daycare shortage because of this, the lifestyle changed and surrounding factors haven't caught up. There are kids regularly staying at after school programs until 6pm because parents are working and no one wants kids wandering around on their own, even in teen years. My local mall has banned kids under 18 unsupervised as yet another example.
If a kid made a scene in public back in 1950, they would be smacked. In fact, in many countries in the world, people are still pro-smacking. Teachers can smack the kids with no moral issue.
Mental health for kids before 2000 was much worse... to be generous to the older generations.
It's a non-issue. Toddlers/kids maybe fly once a month max. Using tablets during that time is negligible.
That drive fucking sucks ass, don't get me wrong, but oh well, that's part of life - the kid has to learn that sometimes shit's not gonna go their way and they have to figure out how to get over it. I'll be damned if I'm gonna teach them that the way they can calm themselves down and regulate their emotions is by the sweet, sweet blue hue of a tablet.
We're a two working parent household and we keep screen time limited to a short amount of TV time. We'll expose them to screens more and more so that we can properly educate them over time, sure. But man, I don't get the whole, "even a two working parent household barely has time for anything and is stressful," bit because - yeah, that's exactly what parenting is.
Parenting is hard. It's exhausting. If you don't have a village, the onus is on you to do it right. That's what we've signed up for, is giving our all to our kids until they're out on their own. That's what we're supposed to do. It's not supposed to be easy, it's a constant stress the likes of which you will never know until you're in it. But we're here, so let's do the hard work and do it right. We owe it to them.
Edit: You're right, we need time and space and the ability to make good choices, but neither of those should come at the expense of my kids.
> That drive fucking sucks ass, don't get me wrong, but oh well, that's part of life
Such a great attitude. Wish everyone saw it this way. I've tanked a few car rides like this but I'll do it a hundred more times before I throw a pacifier at my kids.
We're able to go on a trip on a train, bus, car with zero screens. Haven't tried the plane yet but pressure issues aside, I don't think it will be different and the "whoas" will take the majority of the time.
We watched two videos, selected by me. One was a Monster Truck derby recap, and the other was basically an ad for Jeep Rubicon.
At this age I see absolutely zero reason to stuff them with more screens. And I find it appalling when I hear adults saying "kids want more [mind numbing things]".
Is it hard? Yes, nearly impossible to manage sometimes. Is it worth it? No idea, but I do hope so. Am I bragging? Kinda, but I wanted to jump on the back tapping wagon.
This is the same as quitting smoking or just not thinking about an elephant. You can almost never cease/stop doing something, yet you can almost always displace it with something else.
(Disclaimer 'altacc suggests: I do have kids.)
Blaming anything but the education system that has allowed chromebooks into every classroom k-12 and all the kids do is play games and YT
Who started that? Who boosted it even more during covid? Stop making everything politics
Tech companies with stuff to sell, of course.
Nobody here intends to have an actual conversation including you. You know this but still act obtuse.
I have nothing else to say rn.
Edit: Thank you for all the comments. I'm still happy to discuss. I've calmed down a bit, so my responses will be slightly softer.
I know there's no hard leverage.
This is really not that hard. Modern app culture is highly addictive and provably poison for our brains over time. Adults can choose poison if they wish but when they give it to their kids it is called child abuse.
I'd like to hear more about the results you've gotten with this approach. How do you approach is this with your kids?
With my kids, I oversee everything they do (they are under 6). They average 15min daily for two episodes of a kids show.
I'm not saying go to zero. But definitely not over 3 hours and definitely not a dedicated device for them.
The idea is to send a signal that this is not ok. I have no guarantees on effectiveness. What especially gets me going is when the kid eats and looks at some trash like baby shark while it's blasting loud everywhere.
Regarding my kids: high priority, wide/curated choice (not in terms of restriction, but in terms of actively finding things they may like), accompanied learning, and, crucially, starting from a very young age. It's pretty much standard parenting, that is, one gets out what one puts in.
By the time children start to pressure for this type of devices (say, 10/12), they will have learned to enjoy books and more creative activities.
Mobile devices and social media does not get less addictive as you get older, otherwise anybody over about 30 right now would never have any issues with it. Therefore I worry its entirely possible to bring your children up completely avoiding the downfalls of screentime, but then set them up to fall later because they havent developed the guards against it or even havent 'got it out of their system' so to speak.
Not an excuse but an explanation perhaps?
I think by having adult devices parents will be more cautious and mindful of what they are granting to their kids.
Leaving parenting duties to the overall average of the internet bound together by corporate scammers is not something I will ever do.
Maybe it's making the best of bad parents
Amazon's target market here, wants to parent their kids without parenting their kids. Whether that's a TV with cartoons 20 years ago, a tablet 5 years ago, or a "digital pacifier" today nothing has changed. It's just being fulfilled differently.
My point is that the responsibility is on parents, not companies who will inevitably get the blame and nothing will change. See the other commenter here who said their kids don't even own a tablet.
Even if I want to buy uranium, I shouldn't. And if I want to buy a chair, I shouldn't be seeing only uranium chairs.
Drugs could be a good analogy as it (mostly) affects yourself. A safe route for people to buy those would fix the #1 leading cause of death of young adults in the US today (fentanyl)
The group of parents who let their kids smoke might get those instead, improving their health
The parents who don't allow it would never consider them
I suppose it depends how many of group 2 could be converted to 1 if they were "low tar!".. my intuition is close to zero
Group A is going to smoke regardless, having a healthier product reduces harm
Group B is never going to smoke no matter what's on offer
If we instead imagine a world where parents allowed, even encouraged 60% of children to smoke, and there was no clear route to outright stopping them, giving them at least a better alternative that doesn't hurt them as much would be worth considering
I think it's still better to ban these obviously harmful things and to reduce exposure to them as much as possible.
I agree that if a parent is dead-set on giving their kid endless screen time, tobacco, or heroin, they will find a way to do it. But the tobacco story demonstrates there are many interventions that can significantly decrease the net amount of abuse. If you want to take a public health argument, do it honestly.
Screens or tablets aren't the harmful drug in this situation, they're the needle. A needle that can contain medicine or heroin. The harm is from specific apps and social media. A device can be locked down. You can control what it's able to do and how much. I've used screens to teach myself a language to fluency, a hell of a lot about software development, and countless other things.
Would you object to a tablet that could only access Khan Academy, Openstax and Udemy? What about if we added on a 20 minute allowance of social media? I haven't looked super deep into the Amazon device much but it seems this is the direction they're heading with the parental dashboard
"Educational content has to come first. Your child completes reading or learning goals in Kids+ and educational apps before entertainment apps unlock"
I mean obviously kids are going to try to game the system to get to what they want.. but it seems like a reasonable path to test, and it doesn't require trying to turn every bad parent into a good one, or do something outlandish like ban tablets
IF my kids were to have access to a tablet, I would prefer it be a tablet specifically desgined for kids, rather than a commodity all powerful generic computing device and OS
maybe it'll help us raise good docile consumers and workers tho /s
And I do respect the disclaimer, but lately my experience tells me the devil's advocates help the devil (and I'm an atheist!)
Also they have to learn to use a mouse and a keyboard to do that. You probably forgot how hard it was to learn to use both. Double clicking was really hard for me as a kid
Problem is: there is a limited amount of apps that are genuinely fun and educative. If Amazon wanted really to do something truly educative for children, they'd build a whole market for it, the marketese I see in the article doesn't support that.
What about if I just handed my kid a linux machine and put a 30 min cap on YouTube time via the router. (tiktok etc all just banned)
That might go some way to reproducing the kind of friction we experienced growing up with PCs...
Edit could even start with some on-device parenting apps. What about a local LLM powered to classify videos as slop/educational. More power to them if they figure out how to disable it (I'll add more restrictions after a brief honeymoon period)
The talk in this thread indicates absolutely no empathy for dual working parents and just repeats tired talking points. If anyone here looks back on their own childhood perhaps they actually had similar freedoms? Hell i used to play the Apple 2 obsessively from a very young age. I credit it as formative in a positive way.
You can argue that if you're both working and no one has 100% time to dedicate to raising the child they shouldn't have children but that argument leads to plummeting birth rates.
I say all of this as someone who doesn't have kids but I have at least some sense of how freaking hard it is and in the grand scheme of things a tablet designed for kids isn't the worst thing.
Tell me why an alternative that's at least better than a phone is so bad? If you want to argue a phone or any such device that keeps kids occupied for some time is unacceptable i think you're waaaaay out of touch.
I have a friend who didn't have a television until the age of 12. If you ask which kids turned out well adjusted and which didn't it wasn't the one's with no screen time anymore than the one's with unlimited screen time. There's some reality to life people here aren't accepting and i can't see an issue with some level of hands off parenting that this enables quite honestly.
I know people are going to attack with some extreme of "you allow your kid to be raised by a tablet" or some such but these views are all so tiresome. The reality is that majority of kids have always been allowed some form of screen time and todays screentime is going to at least be more interactive than yesterdays screentime.
Your very point about them being more interactive is what makes them much more dangerous.
The content of TV was also vastly different. There was a barrier to entry, not an infinite stream of brainrot content.
There is just no reason to give kids such devices at a young age, far better learning experiences exist until at least 9 years old.
My wife was worried our son would be "left behind". We talked about it and I pointed out he can already navigate photos, and Spotify to play an audio book; from just looking over our shoulders every now and then. Must be around 5 hours interaction in total (he is 4).
Poking a screen is barely a skill, less than a day and he would be caught up to all the kids that had been staring at one for hours a day since they were 3.
I say this as a parent - hogwash. Fred Rogers looked into children's souls and spoke to them deeply at a nice comfortable pace and kids felt that, whereas today's modern screens utterly eviscerate their attention spans.
I turned on Mr. Rogers Neighborhood for the first time for my son a few days ago. After a few minutes I asked how the show felt. "Relaxing".
We sat down and watched the Music episode together for 20 or so minutes.
Parents can choose what their kids watch and listen to. Ignore the feed.
The school's policy isn't necessarily from a "phones bad mmmkay?" perspective, but from a "our ancestors had to figure stuff out for themselves, let's foster that" perspective.
This is still a terrible idea.
I think it's better to give them a movie rather than an algorithmic feed.
My kids get no more than 10m of tablet time a day each. Both of us are working full time. When they ask for more I point them to their toys/books/etc, or play with them.
So, being dual working doesn’t mean you have to allow your kids to have lots of screen time.
Hell give a bunch of bored kids enough rocks and they'll find a way to build a small village out of said rocks using mud as a connecting material.
What do you mean?
I am a dual working parent. We dont own a tablet and our kids never get handed phones. The kids occasionally watch Bluey and Peppa pig on the TV (live not apps).
Your Apple 2 days were very different to the algorithms and feeds of today. Giving a kid a phone loaded up with the Youtube Kids app is literally like feeding them crack.
> criticizing from the sidelines
You dont even have kids, why do you have such a strong opinion on what real parents are saying about bringing up their own? You are the one criticising from the sidelines whilst us parents are making the tough choices in bringing our kids up.
I am sure there are exceptions, but if you are a duo working parents, you don't have time to dig through children apps to figure out which are good.
Overall tv in common space is better (occasionally), you can keep an eye on what the kid is watching and how is affecting their behavior.
You realize when they are done watching tv way earlier than they are (if ever)
Our kids use tech - Nintendo Switch, tv, raspberry pis, and yes, even a tablet for things like train or plane rides. But they absolutely did not get this as a toddler. Yes we were tired. Yes it was hard. Parenting isn't easy.
The dual working parents part is a red herring.
Single working parent families were still busy as hell in many circumstances. Even with a single kid there has always been a social push to control (historically)women's time and make them try hard to be good wives/mothers. I include socializing and engaging with their community to be part of it.
Nobody ever had the time or energy to watch after a kid 24/7 while dealing chores, paperwork, the rest of the family etc.
HAHAHA no its not. Amazon Kids+ is an endless stream of product tie in mass market commercial junk content.
The quality has gone down over time (amazingly), curation doesn't exist, and discoverability of the little bit of good content that is there is pretty much impossible.
I feel it's great, but then I use Google Kids on the Fire, because Amazon's app is junk in comparison.
And also, my kid is (disabled) autistic and non verbal and this keeps them calm and happy.
So yes it's a great idea.
Other than that, movies and games are less destructive than algorithmic feeds, especially short form video. It is preferable to move outside or read a book. But I think we're comparing vegetables to candy to cigarettes.
Yeah, except for the part where it’s engineered to be as addictive as physiologically possible, it’s exactly the same!
Yeah, but they were right though?
It's improved. When cell phones first came out, I kept getting run into by teenagers in stores and on sidewalks who couldn't both use their phone and navigate the world. That skill is now generally present and it's no longer a problem.
Kids don't fucking know the difference you dirty fucks.
Amazon going full Facebook-at-their-worst. Nice to know.
I'm going off on a big tangent here, but hear me out (or ignore me entirely because there's political content, but in a practical context - I think). Humans don't need much of an excuse to reach for an easy answer, and parenting on its own is probably one of the most difficult undertakings in the human experience. "Modern life" is becoming increasingly complex to navigate, we are bombarded with attention sucking ... everything, giving us the sense that time is so scarce that the easiest, most immediate answer is the only option. This is being made true as much for parenting - give them the electronic device - as it is for work problems - MVP, band-aid, temporary becomes permanent.
Amazon product and marketing is an accelerant of this. Encouragement of the ever decreasing time frame of what is already ridiculous short-termism. Amazon are obviously not alone in this, but neither are they working against it or wanting to leave any possible addiction-money profit on the table. This is one of the reasons I'm obsessed with blocking advertising. The more they can convince you of the importance of "all the things" the more of their things you need to buy to create more time for yourself - at the expense of your child. Nice, Jeff. Nice.
On the quality of parenting: My children's grandparents, on both sides of the family, have been a great help. I guess we've been lucky in having them available, but also (maybe accidentally) smart in not moving away from the local support network of family in order to pursue better/bigger/higher-income careers. Where this relates to the above is that, the pace of life, in combination with having children, almost requires a family support network, more specifically grandparents since they're likely retired or in the twilight of their careers and therefore have more time flexibility. Something that's become increasingly obvious to me is the 'life' advantage bestowed upon those with a local family support network over those without. This is something that often puts migrants well behind locals where my anecdotal-only example is someone I used to work with who had three kids but no extended family, and therefore school drop-offs, pick-ups, doctor's appointments and all the other general activities and emergencies that go with having kids is spread out over two people (mum and dad) rather than a full extended family network.
The point I'm trying to make is that this marketing of electronic pacifiers to parents is a symptom of the (unsustainable) increasing 'urgency' of the pace of modern life, which can be made manageable with a decent extended family support network. The advantages of which are compounding.
Something I heard that really stuck with me was: Children form most of their behavioural patterns by the age of three (or maybe it was 5), and so those early years are the most important in shaping them. It requires less work to get something right the first time, than having to fix something that's broken. This isn't to say things can't go wrong, but what it means is to do your best for those years to have a chance at being able to reclaim more of yourself at a later stage.
Ultimately, if you "just give them the tablet" now, you'll be "just giving them the tablet" for the rest of your life.
/ridiculously tangential rant (just had to get some of the thoughts written down to see how they turned out)
PS to parents: give your child a toy or a book not a tablet ffs.
Not all devices are equally bad.
I've been happily learning to code my own video games on Intel 486 PC in QuickBasic since late elementary school (age 10), and yes, I played outdoors with other kids too.
Before I had PC of my own, I was making them on paper (game design and mechanics, not literal code).
Has the extra benefit of getting them ready for the workforce. /s
If shitty parent's don't care about well-being of their children, they could at least consider the cost of future medication, not to even mention likely worse performance in school and job market.
> While observing 422 children ages 3 to 5, a 2022 study led by Radesky found that mobile device use for calming — in other words, a digital pacifier — was associated with “decreased executive functioning and increased emotional reactivity.” (Executive function refers to memory and problem-solving skills needed for everyday life. Emotional reactivity refers to poor impulse control in response to stress, pain, and other negative feelings.)
ADHD is a type of executive function disorder.
I'll say it's misguided, as well as the root comment to which you're reaponding. The particular study soesnmt show causation, but there's a growing bidy of research that does (it's easy to find).
ADHD is an executive functioning disorder with mainly genetic causes, it is not something that you can parent a kid out of, or in to.
With lifestyle changes to you can manage it, or make it worse. But you don't cause it, or prevent it from happening from letting kids use tablets.
The current neurodevelopmental understanding sees the genetic component as latent tendency, with the environment as the trigger that can drive the manifestation of traits.
There is also something called "Attention Deficit Trait", which is case of ADHD like symptoms where the cause is not in genetics, but solely in environmental factors. While real ADHD is largely in genetics, I fully believe any individual can mess up their dopamine system by spending enough time browsing social media on their smartphone.
Most people who get ADHD diagnosis do have the condition (assuming proper diagnosis procedures were followed), but in a different environment it could probably be much less of an issue for many.