Two-thirds of babies watch screens – some for eight hours a day
thetimes.comI once in a supermarket saw a probably 2-year old sitting in a stroller, holding a smartphone watching Youtube. When the ads came up, the little fella confidently pressed the "skip ad" button. I was perplexed and stunned, how can a child that can't even walk yet have the practice to know how to skip the ads. I don't even want to know the screentime that kid has.
Maybe this is evidence that the urge to skip ads is innate.
Parrot skips ads https://www.youtube.com/shorts/MLoJ_t36Png
It is the first thing most any kid learns on a tablet.
Anything to keep the dopamine flowing.
A 2-year old should be able to walk unless they are pretty severely developmentally delayed.
sitting in a stroller doesn’t mean the kid can’t walk
I agree, but OP stated:
> a child that can't even walk yet
Cmon. Let's not always be so pendantic. If we may, a 2yo doesn't fully walk, like eg a 5yo. And a 5yo doesn't walk like a 12yo.
My 5yo can kick an adult hard enough to hurt them thanks to kickboxing training, you bet he can walk like a 12yo lol
My dude, go grocery shopping with a 2-year-old and see if you want them walking around. They'll be peeling a sticker off the floor for two minutes, then grabbing everything off the shelf. It's perfectly normal to cart the kid around so you can actually make progress through the aisles. They can reasonably follow you around between 3-4.
OP said “how can a child that can't even walk yet have the practice to know how to skip the ads.” A two year old should definitely know how to walk. Obviously you will not have it strutting around in a store, but it should know how to walk.
Also I don’t let my two year old near screens on her own, and generally do not allow screen time at all, but she absorbs things at a pace which is incredible. If I were to “skip ads” in front of her, I’d only have to do it around twice for her to be able to do it on her own…
That depends on the kid and time. Mine carries the small cart and fills what we buy regularly. And other times we need to contrain him as expected.
I think the point was fine motor control at 2.
My dude, that is not what
>how can a child that can't even walk yet
means.
Also, my 2 year olds walked around the store all the time, as well as sat in the cart when I didn't have time to supervise. It is good exercise, and helps them practice following instructions.
They just leave them outside in the stroller in someplace like Sweden. It's hilarious how on HN the nordic countries are idolized and leaving strollers outside while the kid stares at the street man smoking fentanyl out of a piece of aluminum foil indicates you are a glorious liberated member of intelligentsia but by god if you put a tablet on to get a moment of peace while you take a shower then you are a hideous sub-human piece of garbage.
Babies. They leave there babies. They do not leave there two years old already fully capable to toddle away and still dumb enough to walk into anything.
Also, not every city has the same massive drug addiction homelessness problem as yours.
Sweden doesn't have as big a problem with drug addicts, homeless people etc. on the streets. Although it's changed a lot in recent years.
In most countries it's illegal to leave any child unattended in a way that puts them at risk which is a vague definition. But if something were to happen to the child while unsupervised any vagueness collapses into negligence. A baby will sleep in the pram, but for a toddler to be abandoned alone strapped in the pram is capital punishment.
Giving them a tablet so you can get a brief moment of respite to do something you have to do is different from watching 8 hours of a screen a day!
> how can a child that can't even walk yet have the practice to know how to skip the ads
At 2 kids can walk and have fine enough motor skills to press a small button, if that was the direction you were thinking.
Kids are surprisingly intuitive and form connections super quickly. It probably took a few tries, and maybe the parent even showed them how to do it: button appeared in the corner > press it > see fun content. If something works they commit it to memory like you wouldn't imagine.
The other day, while waiting for my kebab at the kebab shop, a kid that was also there got a lollipop from the lady at the till. She went to show her mum, and asked for her to take a picture of it for some reason.
She held the lollipop out in front of her, with her open palm behind the lolly to create a bigger focus target for the camera. This is a common trick for content creators who showcase small items (like make-up products) on camera, to avoid autofocus issues.
She was maybe 4. I was pretty dismayed when I saw that, to be honest.
I have a 4 month old, and at the moment the only screen time she's allowed is video calls with the grandparents, who are in a different country. Neither me or the wife are even allowed to operate our phones while the baby can see the screen, let alone watch tv! She turns into an instant zombie, even if I am just reading HN.
most of the kids learn to walk around age 1, by the age 2 they should be already speaking
My wife stays home with our kids. My daughter ends up watching a fair bit of television while my wife does chores and the like.
We're entirely curating what she's watching and I'm just not that concerned. If anything, she's learning things that I would not thought to teach her at her age. About 6 months ago she had an assessment through the school district for early education and at 2 years of age was able to identify about half the letters of the the alphabet.
My wife and I watching this happen were genuinely surprised because neither of us had even considered trying to teach the alphabet to a 2-year old. We did not teach her this, educational content taught her this.
I don't really worry. I watched TV basically my entire childhood growing up in the '80s, in the height of stranger danger where I largely was not allowed to go outside. It was a lot worse than this. I watched game shows, Hogans Heroes, Night Court. She's watching Ms. Rachel, Meekah, and Sesame Street.
I think the kids will be all right as long as you're involved. We're not hand our kid a tablet and saying "Go nuts". We're watching TV in the living room as a family.
IMO tablets/touchscreens are specifically what’s bad
my kids watch lots of movies/tv shows on the family tv and play console games, usually they get bored after an hour or 2 and then do something creative or play with toys, they’re all excelling in school
the few times they have had access to tablets it is like crack to them, they will just not put it down
whenever i take them out shopping or to a restaurant we are the only family that doesn’t have all the kids with headphones and tablets . i’ve seen some disturbing shit, kids on a nature walk with tablets and headphones, kids watching tiktok on their phones while on the lazy river at the waterpark. somehow i am able to take 3 kids to the supermarket by myself without screens but then i see parents with 1 kid still needing to babysit them with a tablet
> I watched game shows, Hogans Heroes, Night Court. She's watching Ms. Rachel, Meekah, and Sesame Street.
At 2 years old?
There are babies under a year who watch youtube brainrot shat out by obscure indian animation farms multiple hours a day, I'm not sure it has the same impact as watching Stargate when you're eight. My niece is 9 months, she never watched anything on a phone yet as soon as someone in her line of sight gets a phone out she's mesmerized, it's scary to witness
> At 2
Yes, I absolutely did.
I was home with my dad, gated into the living room while he did things around the house. There is only so much to do.
You have no idea what potential of you was lost there, and we don't even know what your life looks like so can't judge any of that. But stating 'I spent most of my childhood in front of TV so all is fine' is... I guess you don't have strong affinity towards nature, adventure, sports, wildish traveling for example?
You do you (and your kids), but as a parent of small kids myself we do TV max maybe 30 mins weekly on average, older cartoons (age 4 and 6). There is little gained and a lot lost in screens, but you need to be aware of things being lost in the first place lol. Screens form addictions, active screens even moreso - why do this to your own children? Why not just let them roam the streets all day then, they will gather much more experience that way. Don't tell me it can be harmful to them - screens are too yet seemingly very few care.
Its much harder spending quality with them of course - this is the main reason why most parents slack off. Actively engaging with them, leading them by example, coming up with novel ways to play with them, that's not how our generation was raised up. Its not easy for me, for some reason easier for my wife, but we are trying our best. If anything in life is wroth pursuing will all vigor, this is it and not some empty white collar careers or even worse money status (this comes from senior dev in a bank and a doctor couple).
In my view, there are only few paths towards happy balanced adult individual that knows what they want in life and go for it, and this is the most sure way even though there are never any guarantees.
>But stating 'I spent most of my childhood in front of TV so all is fine' is... I guess you don't have strong affinity towards nature, adventure, sports, wildish traveling for example?
There is no reason to assume this.
>Screens form addictions, active screens even moreso - why do this to your own children? Why not just let them roam the streets all day then, they will gather much more experience that way. Don't tell me it can be harmful to them - screens are too yet seemingly very few care.
The article and conversation is about babies. Maybe the context an be stretched to toddlers, even age 5 or 6. Letting a baby or toddler roam the streets alone (in the USA with huge vehicles and distracted drivers all around) is far more harmful than letting them watch curated content on screens.
This isn't a village in a developing country with a whole group of kids with varying ages that look after each other. It's a developed country, with barely any other kids outside, from various "cultures", and legal liability, and risk of severe bodily harm from unsupervised outside time.
>this comes from senior dev in a bank and a doctor couple)
Perhaps you have more flexibility / less stress in your life than 95% of other couples?
I would expect everyone to be mesmerized by amazing technology they have not gotten used to yet.
Babies are designed to pay attention to what you pay attention to, and want to do the same.
It may be more 'harmful' for babies to see parents paying attention to screens than it is for them to watch the screen themselves.
(They also become very good at telling if you're really "looking" at the phone or just pretending to look at something.)
Maybe the plus side is if screens become their encoded reality from a young age, staring at a screen for work because that's the only thing you can do that pays well enough to support a family won't be nearly as depressing and just feel normal.
"Babies are designed..."
sure they are.
> We're entirely curating what she's watching and I'm just not that concerned.
That is likely the key element, along with being the reason why the guidance suggests no screen time before the age of 2.
Some parents know what their child needs, some parents don't know how to navigate the mess of children's content, some parents would use it to justify using the screen as a babysitter. It is nearly impossible to offer generic advice, so it tends to be on the safe-side.
It is also worth noting that you are using one metric here, assessments based upon academic achievement. There are other things to consider, such as social and physical development. Perhaps your family is also taking that into account, but again they have to consider how everyone would interpret generic guidance.
No the no screen time before 2 has nothing to do with content. Read my reply to the GP comment.
Yeah, I use Ms Rachel with my son when I need to cut his nails or if I am alone with him and I need to take a shower or something.
He goes to swimming classes and he learned to clap in the "If You're Happy and you know it" song even though the song is different in his classes, I was confused as to how he learned that you usually clap in the song but I presume he learned it from Ms Rachel.
It's useful English language exposure for him too as we live in a non-English speaking country and my partner doesn't speak English either so without TV I am his only exposure to English.
I wouldn't let him watch it for 8 hours, but I presume that's the typical newspaper sensationalising.
It's amusing to watch kids pick up Australian slang from Bluey.
> I don't really worry. I watched TV basically my entire childhood growing up in the '80s, in the height of stranger danger where I largely was not allowed to go outside. It was a lot worse than this. I watched game shows, Hogans Heroes, Night Court. She's watching Ms. Rachel, Meekah, and Sesame Street.
For a long time our kid was only allowed to watch Mr. Rogers. That show is very gentle and slow paced (also: people, not brightly colored flashing cartoons), which I read somewhere is great for young kids.
Also, since I watched it as a kid, I kinda know what I'm getting. I don't really have the time to search for and vet TV shows. And I do not trust anything made for streaming economies, after reading about Cocomelon (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/05/arts/television/cocomelon...) and seeing the stupid unimaginative wasteland that is Blippi (https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2020/08/the-dead-world-o...):
> In fact, the more I watch Blippi (and boy, have I watched Blippi), the more horrified I am by how thin and dull the Blippiverse is. Blippi does not seem to read books. He does not play make-believe, except to pretend he is doing the thing that the toy or playground object has been built for him to do with it. “Science” means dropping a piece of fruit in the pool and seeing if it floats. The interesting thing about an elephant is that it’s heavy. What about music? Art? History? Theater? The natural world? The wonders of outer space? Mr. Rogers had episodes about grandparents, about not wasting things, about being brave at the emergency room. On any given week he might introduce you to Yo-Yo Ma or Eric Carle of Very Hungry Caterpillar fame. Sesame Street met all the people in your neighborhood and talked about what they do and why it matters, rather than focusing on the trucks they drive.
I really wish someone had put in the effort to digitize the whole run of 321 Contact (all I've been able to find is a smattering of nth-generation re-encodes on YouTube).
My 2.5 year old and my 4 year old both get their fair share of TV.
But there’s a reason the AAP recommends no screen time before 2.
There’s a lot of data that show that babies and toddlers don’t learn language skills from TV for some reason. And it inhibits learning because instead of doing what they’d normally do which is watch and listen to adults and older kids speaking they are glued to the screen.
I have always been suspect of AAP recommendations due to their stance on male genital mutilation. Their risk tolerances are clearly subject to political whims, although I guess I can't expect any better from a human organization.
>And it inhibits learning because instead of doing what they’d normally do which is watch and listen to adults and older kids speaking they are glued to the screen.
For example, is the AAP incorporating the fact that many babies today have greatly reduced access to another adult or older kids to watch and listen to? What if (some) "screen time" is better than the minimum from a tired mom and dad for them?
I’m not going to get into debate on the ethicality of infant circumcision, but there are zero counties that have outlawed it, so there isn’t a jurisdiction on earth that considers it genital mutilation.
As far as their risk tolerances go, ignoring ethical considerations their stance is that the medical benefits slightly outweigh the risks. The view of most European medical associations is that the risks slightly outweigh the benefits.
Neither position is very far from the other in terms of risk analysis.
> For example, is the AAP incorporating the fact that many babies today have greatly reduced access to another adult or older kids to watch and listen to? What if (some) "screen time" is better than the minimum from a tired mom and dad for them?
Do you have kids? Babies require constant adult supervision, so there should never be a time when they don’t have access to an adult.
TV under 2 is detrimental to language development. Is it possible that a parking a baby in front of a TV all day is better than parking a baby in front of a gray wall with no stimuli or interaction and letting them scream? Sure. But no one has that data, or ever will. And no medical agency anywhere in the world is going to issue advice like that.
Smoking is probably protective against Parkinson’s disease but no one is going to add a disclaimer to their PSAs to tell you that. That’s not how public health agencies work.
> so there isn’t a jurisdiction on earth that considers it genital mutilation.
It is a political fight not worth losing, hence no jurisdiction considers it genital mutilation. But the simplest evidence is that if it didn’t already exist, and someone were to propose it, they would be excommunicated from any community for suggesting unnecessary surgery on a baby.
> Do you have kids? Babies require constant adult supervision, so there should never be a time when they don’t have access to an adult.
Yes, I do.
> Is it possible that a parking a baby in front of a TV all day is better than parking a baby in front of a gray wall with no stimuli or interaction and letting them scream? Sure. But no one has that data, or ever will. And no medical agency anywhere in the world is going to issue advice like that.
These are irrelevant scenarios. The AAP says zero screen time. It seems like an arbitrarily restrictive suggestion when almost all kids grow up with more than zero screen time for many decades now. And almost all parents will let their kid under 2 have some screen time, so it leads to an assumption that the other AAP recommendations can be overly strict also.
> But the simplest evidence is that if it didn’t already exist, and someone were to propose it, they would be excommunicated from any community for suggesting unnecessary surgery on a baby.
But it does already exist. If ear piercing didn’t exist, people would think you were insane for having someone shove a wire through your kid’s ear. We do all kinds of weird things to our kids that aliens from another planet would fine insane without any cultural context.
Edit: turns out the AAP recently updated their policy
>Infants under 18 months learn best from real-world interactions. Heavy solo screen use can affect their developing language and social skills, for example. Outcomes depend on how many hours a day little ones spend on digital media and how adults use screens to calm or entertain them. But misuse of digital media can cause:
I feel the same about ear piercing.
That AAP guideline makes more sense to me.
I have two boys. 2 and 5. We’ve never done screens, instead we do books and focused attention from each parent and we are looked at like crazy people when we tell people that. But our kids are miles ahead of their cohorts in attention span, respectfulness, behavior, socializing, etc. It’s actually alarming. I really worry about them being outcasts just by being raised like we all were.
By zero screen time do you just mean no phones / tablets / interactive screen use? Or are you including TV / movies etc.
If it's the latter I think you might be over attributing your child's behavioral development to the lack of screen time that it actually is. I have a 3 year old daughter who is much more social and chatty, has a great attention span and self-play / imagination etc. than many of her peers who have zero screen time.
I wouldn't say we give her a lot of screen time, maybe a 2-3 hrs a week (mostly over the weekend) + sickness + the occasional family movie night (Frozen, Moana etc.). But it's enough where she has certain segments of Ms. Rachel episodes memorized.
Anecdotally, the parents who enforce the no screen time rules seem to be the ones who over-parent their kids and have kids who cling to their legs at the park for the first half hour, melt down without snacks, etc.
Also the screen time carries over into other hands free, fun activities like listening to the songs on the speaker and acting out what she had watched or dancing especially during those hectic weeknights when she wants to interact with us but we need to cook dinner and can't sit down to play toys with her.
It feels like children's development is more highly correlated with parents' involvement than with screen time per se. Obviously, a large amount of screen time would cause a lack of involvement, but zero screen time seems more like an act of virtue than one for effect.
> I really worry about them being outcasts just by being raised like we all were.
Seeing all the kids my kids play with, the ones who seem to turn out the most well rounded aren’t the ones without screen time but the ones without helicopter parents.
You’d be surprised how many of these kids have never been outside of their parents line of sight, even at middle school age.
My kid's school won't even release the child off the bus without a parent present. I let my kid walk on my own property and it wasn't 30 seconds before a Karen drove up to interrogate them about why they are "alone." It's gotten pretty crazy. Any asshole who wants veto powers on your parenting can punish you for weeks, and the geniuses who wrote the reporting laws make it illegal for you to even find out who your accuser is. Enforcers of the state are often happy to indulge their psychopathy, yes probably nothing will happen (though occasionally does), but in the process they scare the shit out of the child and the process is the punishment.
The USA badly needs a mass rewrite of negligence law, and the end of anonymous CPS complaints, before we can reasonably expect the helicopter insanity to end.
> the geniuses who wrote the reporting laws make it illegal for you to even find out who your accuser is.
> and the end of anonymous CPS complaints
If someone reported you to CPS and you found out who, what would you do with that information?
Exercise my right to face my accuser. Sue them of course, this is America.
I suspect they would be drinking through a straw for a month or so and then complaints would stop :) OP’s comment is too funny!!!
Same with us. Our 24 month can count to 20 and knows all the letters without watching TV.
When he is at a party and a tv is on in the distance he stares like a zombie at it. It's depressing at how TV changes him and I have to transfer his focus away.
> Our 24 month can count to 20 and knows all the letters without watching TV.
I have a very qualified pediatric occupational therapist friend and when I was sort of bragging about how many "cool things" my toddler can do I was immediately told that they are nice party tricks but don't say much about the development of the child, predict future performance or intelligence, and definitely aren't what I should be focusing on as a parent.
The child didn't just naturally learn to do those tricks. Our games focused a lot on this because I thought "it builds brain and skills", always be ahead of all other kids. In reality only I benefited from this because I could drop it in random conversation and then have pride flow out my ears. And the kid kept repeating the now easy tricks looking for the reward, staying inside the comfort zone.
I was told to simply guide our interactions with a method called "serve and return"[0]. It's a much more powerful tool that makes any and every interaction an opportunity for development, not just individual tasks practiced to perfection and repeated for rewards. You guide but also let yourself be guided so your child gets to feel comfortable opening all kinds of doors rather than you even unwittingly pushing them through the same one again and again.
[0] https://developingchild.harvard.edu/key-concept/serve-and-re...
Thanks for the comment! I remember watching videos about this when he was younger. We actually didn't teach him numbers or the alphabet--he would point to signs on walks and say a letter then we would add another letter or two at the same time. So he just gradually learned them.
But I also am very much in the camp of "it doesn't matter what he knows right now. Kids advance in different ways at different times and it mostly just levels out" All you can do is amazed at how fast they grow and try to help them out as much as you can.
We found pretty good results with a sort of inoculation strategy, lots of slow boring TV, sometimes she even tells us to turn it off because it distracts the parents too much LOL
It "turns you into zombies", that is, you like it, and others in the room feel left out.
"When he is at a party and a tv is on in the distance he stares like a zombie…"
Friday was eat-out night when we raised our daughters. A particular Thai restaurant that we enjoyed was crossed off our list because they always had a television on in the corner of the dining area. It was a complete family-conversation killer.
I left a comment on the bill saying that it was off-putting. (I even TV-Be-Gone'd their set on one visit.) But ultimately we just stopped going.
My kiddos have had low but positive screen time and knew the alphabet quite a bit earlier.
My personal impression is that while there's deffo stuff kids shouldn't watch, the thing that matters is what the kids do apart from TV. If it's nothing, or insufficient, it will be terrible. If as well as screens kids get plenty of high quality attention, the outcome will be good.
You could argue, and I'd struggle to disagree, that less screen time is always good. But there's tradeoffs in this optimisation. Parental attention and energy are also finite - unless you're super rich, have 3 nannies, a chef and not working. At some level, giving the poor overworked parent a break by sticking the child in front of a screen for a bit might mean the parent has more energy to do something worthwhile with the kiddos afterwards.
There's a nice statistical experiment in it no doubt - child outcome as function of screen time, high quality time and "fend for yourself" time, controlled by how much energy the parents have - will the coefficient on screen time be negative? Merely zero? Maybe even positive, just smaller than the other ones?
But good luck getting the data, never mind randomisation.
I'm so happy I don't have children (yet?) for that reason. Like, are you doing your child a disservice in the long run by doing what I'd call the right thing? I wouldn't dare answer that…
One thing I'm really glad we've been doing with our eldest (3) is Saturday morning cartoons
We only let her watch occasionally during the week, but saturday morning, she gets to sit in front of the TV for a few hours and watch cartoons that she gets to pick (from an approved list)
It's always SO heartwarming how excited she gets when she realizes its Saturday morning.
we avoid it very well with our kids but sometimes I am worried it won't make a difference in the long run and we are just doing hard mode for no reason. kids are pretty adaptable. will be interesting to see in 10-15 years.
> A report finds a third of newborns use devices for more than three hours, despite government advice that under-twos have no screen time at all
Disgusting :(
That said, I can't read the article, paywalled. Anyone have a working link?
What's going to happen to those poor babies do you think?
The public doesn't even have the capacity to support all the babies that are outright abused. A lot of researchers will get more notches on their precious CV but let's be real, if anyone gave a shit about random babies then screen time is so far down the list that they're never going to get there under any rational prioritization of who needs assistance.
They’ll be sold software to correct the damage.
Gen Z is the first generation to score lower on standardized tests than previous generations.
> https://fortune.com/2026/02/21/laptops-tablets-schools-gen-z...
I mean that probably has more to do with basically shutting schools down for a year or more tbh.
TBF content is generally better than it was 15 years ago even for babies. I don't blame em...
It's better at holding their attention, but is it actually better?
My impression was that a lot of the content was effectively "attention slop", bright colors and noises, often with very little sense to them, or just variations of the same rhymes a 90's baby would've been raised on.
A lot of it seemed to cross over from just being stimulating to being overstimulating.
> It's better at holding their attention, but is it actually better?
As Weller said, that's entertainment. Saying something's slop is like saying it's trash, ie something you don't like.
I'd like to believe that people have a bit more in mind for children's entertainment than just overstimulating their developing visual and auditory cortices for 8 hours a day.
> overstimulating
pure speculation, and dare I say, hysteria
Yeah? Then heroin is also ice cream.
The quality of the content is not the issue here.