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Comment by sfeng | Hacker News Reader

My recommendation to anyone having kids is have a zero tolerance policy for babies under 2 looking at a screen. The second you start allowing it a bit, you find moments when your life would be just so much easier if you put on a show. It’s brutal to have to find ways to keep them entertained at times, but not having the option is the only way to avoid using it too much.

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The hardest part of parenting I have found is suffering in the short term to enforce the vision of the long term. Years and years of avoiding hitting the easy button, enforcing the rules, squeezing consistency from my tired brain. Their developing brains are insanely good pattern matchers and that reward chasing hits harder than you can possibly imagine. 3-4 year olds can feel your mental weak spots and will constantly see if different whining at different times or perhaps epic resistance at strategic moments can yield the outcome they want. It's like a super powered adversarial model but cuter.

The payoff of consistency is worth it. It buys you a sustainable pattern, which is golden.

Our pediatrician told me something that always stuck - “You just need 1% more willpower than they have.” Always made setting boundaries a little easier.

Yeah you have to see 5-10 years down the road for the payoff. That’s very hard when you’re making a bottle or breastfeeding at 3 am before a client meeting at 8. Or on a flight with a toddler bored, tired, and hungry. I have teens who are really good kids so the payoff is worth it but the struggle to get there is real.

It really is like the velociraptors in Jurassic Park, systematically probing the fence line for weak spots.

I think today's parents themselves underestimate how much they themselves suffer from the "life would be so much easier" - whipping out their phones in quiet times as some kind of self-soothing. And they can make excuses like "I need to reply to some messages" but honestly, messages are async and they can wait.

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.

This is often pretty easy (depending on your circumstances) for a first child, and we mostly followed it for our first. (There was a little screen time before she got to 2 but only low intensity shows on a regular full-sized TV - still her only screen time several years on, but with more choice from her).

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".

Exactly this. Sometimes it helps to cycle toys, i.e. put some away and get others back out of storage, so the kids are excited about them again.

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.

Audiobooks sounds good, but only as part of their entertainment - it's always better as a parent to read to them (bonding experience, reading emotions from each other, etc), and it's of course important that they learn to read themselves.

(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)

Read-along audiobooks on tape were a staple of my childhood. Even before they can read the words, they are seeing pictures that correspond to the narration. I knew the soundscape of Star Wars years before I ever saw the actual movie.

I wonder if those kinds of things still exist in some format.

Kid slop is real and it pre-dates LLMs, sometimes nanny brings books without checking for taste and it's rough.

under 2? UNDER 2?

What the f? how about 4 or 5? They can listen to audiobooks in the car

Never letting a 3 year old watch any TV is a defensible position if you can manage it, but is definitely on the extreme end of actual practice.

In a TV household for sure.

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

In an ideal world, people live and grow up in homes with dedicated spaces for dedicated activities - a bedroom for every individual for rest and retreat, a TV / gaming room for entertainment, a living room for guests and hanging out, that kind of thing. But in practice houses are getting smaller and more expensive and more activities have to happen all in one space.

Even than, the TV was just not something which was constantly running.

Who in this comment chain said they do that?

Or music. Or they can learn to be bored for a while - I remember car drives as a time to go into my imagination and tune out for a bit.

Said imagination died for the most part at some point in the past 30 years but I remember it well enough.

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