Amazon’s “digital pacifier” for toddlers
oligarchwatch.substack.comWhat pediatricians and many others actually say:
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.
[delayed]
> AI assistant integrated plushies.
Modern day Furbies?
or be me and discover live* and ** at the age of 11 including the dark web.
Although I am not sure how much it shaped my life since self reflection is quite hard.
Rrrriiight…
>“Kids want a real tablet, not a toy,” the Jeff Bezos-founded company said in a press release
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'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.
Seconded. Screens, for some reason, have an insane magical draw to kids. I remember being in the thrall of friends who got to play on the newest consoles, magazines, movies, while we got very limited exposure, very old consoles & limited time, and no tv. Given the effort I need today to stay off feeds, and how tired & spent I feel after, I can't imagine how much "giving kids what they want" would fry kids brains. I can't compare against smb who didn't get the same restriction as I did, but I definitely don't feel like our restrictions did any harm, likely the opposite.
Definitely a thread where I want to know if a commenter has children or not. Before becoming parents many people have opinions about raising children that afterwards turn into understanding of actually why parents act the way they do.
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.
Not just that, but:
- 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.
Do I need to have children to evaluate the past, present, potential future and my own upbringing together with science to tell you what should be the perfect parenting?
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.
I wish we could disambiguate between what we mean by “screen” in these conversations. A screen is a medium, which I do not believe is universally bad. I am not sure about tablets and they do seem like they can have “bad” content, and I am 100% sure they are used as a crutch when they “shouldn’t” be.
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.
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.
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.
It really is like the velociraptors in Jurassic Park, systematically probing the fence line for weak spots.
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.
Our pediatrician told me something that always stuck - “You just need 1% more willpower than they have.” Always made setting boundaries a little easier.
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".
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.
Have a 5yo daughter.
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.
Ours is going on 4 - and I’ve gone by the same principles as to how I trained our cats to never beg for food and not get fat - abundance.
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.
She will be 4.
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.
Get kids an old computer. They prefer something big they can see, with switches that make a resounding clunk, and drives that make clanking noises.
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.
when i was around 8-9? i got my first "PC".
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.
I wanted a PC so bad I used to "wire up" a pocket calculator to a TV with a piece of string and pretend it was a keyboard and the TV was the monitor. My parents didn't trust me with a "real PC", but they did eventually get me a Famicom clone that at least had a proper keyboard. What they didn't know was that it also had BASIC, and thus my fate was sealed.
You just unlocked memories I have of playing with a typewriter as a kid. A big big clunky one. Hitting those keys would be so satisfying. I didn't have an ink ribbon, so no actual typing happened, just hitting those big ass keys.
This was before computers were common.
My kids started with desktops, and in family areas of the house. I did not go as far as getting something from the 1980s or teaching them to use the command line as toddlers, but they were second hand desktops running 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.
Yep, this is what we did. Both my kids are computer kids now and look down (nicely) on the "iPad kids".
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.
I watched a colleague's kid play a game on his iPhone. It was on airplane mode. But every so often a window would pop up trying to show an ad, and the kid would hand it to his dad, asking dad to "fix" it.
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...
Can you take that on an airplane?
Cool idea. Where would I get one?
Maybe an old Amiga. It's easy to get started, as most games boot automatically from the floppy disk. When they are ready for more advanced usage, the default boot ends up in Workbench where they can get a desktop environment.
After a while, expose them to programming through AMOS or Blitz Basic.
doesnt HAVE to be old.
just a regular PC with keyboard mouse monitor and the unit.
edit: maybe a DVD unit for reading AND writing disks.
In this case I gave them a COMPAQ Portable III I rescued from my father-in-law's computer repair shop.
myroom.isfine.org on a pinch. I tried to make everything as authentically annoying as it was, having to rewind tapes shapes character
Very cool! I just turned on the PC and monitor, loaded the Wolfenstein 3D floppy, and ran it.
Look up the Pocket 386.
Don't give kids a computer, give them a camera. A real one.
A toddler needs manipulative toys to develop patience and motor control. Blocks to stack, puzzles to fit together, balls to throw and catch, books with pages to turn. Nothing electronic at all.
I agree. As they get older there is more room for electronic stuff and it can have benefits. I think the first apps my kids used were things like GCompris.
Hard agree. And a lot of unstructured play. Actually, that should all last well into their pre-teens IMO.
...lots of unstructured play I surely did have with my slow as molasses bloated Pentium 4 machine with XP and no internet in my childhood. Developed a LOT of patience when downloading stuff from the Net (on 256Kbps, no less!) on one PC and moving it over to my machine.
256 whole kilobits per second? Talk about instant gratification. You kids and your fancy broadband connections, back in my day all we got was dial-up at 56k and we liked it!
Dial up! We had to type in listings printed in magazines. And we liked it!
> And a lot of unstructured play.
... 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.
No, let them paint.
I did that and now they want me to buy film for it, which costs a small fortune. And would be even harder to find someone to develop.
Re: development - I've started shooting film for the first time recently and have been developing B&W film in my kitchen using Caffenol, a mixture of instant coffee, washing soda, and vitamin C tablets, all things you can get at the grocery store. https://www.caffenol.org/recipes/ (I've been using the standard "delta" recipe, I don't do any temperature control, whatever my room temp has been has been fine)
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...
Why does it have to be a film camera? A "real" camera can still be a digital one.
There's plenty of places online you can mail film to to be developed.
Spengler talked about the total decay of morals and ethics and the death of the West more than 100 years ago, and he was later called reactionary by many. When even parents have totally abdicated from the sacred duty of raising a child, we know he has been right all along.
I thought the millenial journey of discovering their parents sucked through therapy was almost a trope at this point. Certainly the previous generations had more kids, and probably spent less time actively parenting them.
> Certainly the previous generations had more kids, and probably spent less time actively parenting them.
Yes but those kids weren't at real risk of having their minds completely subverted by for-profit organizations.
Spengler kinda was a reactionary, though. And his writings on this subject aren’t particularly unique. Off the top of my head, Hannah Arendt and Christopher Lasch are 20th century philosophers who have made similar critiques.
There have always been bad parents. There have always been parents who dgaf; there have been parents unable to cope; there have been earnest but misguided parents.
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.
The data shows that in western societies, both mothers and fathers spend more time engaged with their kids than previous generations, not less.
> On its website, Amazon notes that ads can appear in apps for children whose devices aren’t signed up for the premium subscription.
Giving serious Black Mirror vibes with that. Specifically Common People https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_People_(Black_Mirror)
Is that even remotely surprising? The billionaires at the top of most FAANG and FAANG-adjacent companies have repeatedly proven they'll do anything to pad their stock prices and increase their wealth.
When I was a kid, my "digital pacifier" was my thumb...
I'm not a parent, but don't parents give their kids tablets all the time? The number of toddlers I've seen walking around with tablets glued to their faces makes me uncomfortable, but they're actually just ipads or android tablets. This product seems to me like just another tablet, with a slightly different build for kids.
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.
If you’re not a parent, you're probably only seeing children in places which are not designed with children in mind - places where there’s no place to run and play, and kids have to be quiet. In those places you have to pacify child somehow, a lot of parents use digital entertainment. If you go to child friendly places, you would see it much less.
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.
Another big part of this is the lack of support structures. As a family we need to get things done, toddlers often prevent that. When there's no grandparent who is able to be there and help watch the kids, what really is the alternative?
Books? Coloring in? drawing? Audio books? Duplo? Magnatiles?
There are any number of alternatives that don’t involve a screen.
books are fine once you hit 6-7 years old, before then they'll get bored of them after 15-20mn since they can't read comfortably
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
> 6-7 years old, before then they'll get bored of them after 15-20mn since they can't read comfortably
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.
> books are fine once you hit 6-7 years old, before then they'll get bored of them after 15-20mn since they can't read comfortably
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.
my kids have a personal music/story player (Yoto portable for those curious, it can be loaded with your own recordings if the cost of the licenced cards is too much).
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.
Exactly the same deal here. She can crush hours on a plane, but it’s a n-times a year thing, not a habit.
Honestly, when I was a kid I was dragged to a lot of places which were adult spaces with my parents and it'd be boring but I'd just have to deal with it. We shouldn't be conditioning kids that they should be kept entertained and distracted for every waking second of their day because it doesn't prepare them for the fact that sometimes in life, things will be boring.
It's really funny how inevitable it is to end up being the person who says, effectively "In My Day".
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.
I hugely agree with this, not so much because they need to tolerate boredom, but because I think there are huge benefits to observing things/watching the world go by, to daydreaming, and to simple activities.
I would bet 90%+ of the time, kids would end up observing all the adults looking at their devices...which help keep the adults entertained and distracted for every waking second of their day.
Honestly, having an experience of something as a kid gives you absolutely no insight into what it's like to be a parent. Not to mention that every child is drastically different and will react very differently to the same situation.
> I'm not sure this product in isolation increases the number of tablet viewing toddlers.
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.
Yeah they do. Usually staring at Peppa Pig and crap like that. Take it away and they have a meltdown. It's awful.
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.
Screens are horrible. I am absolutely not on the side of screens in general and Amazon deserves this attack. But please don't comment to complain about bad parenting if you haven't had kids or had 1 or 2 neuro typical, easy kids and a wife who did most of the parenting. You really don't know. Really.
I'm also allowed to complain then :)
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.
Maybe we're spoiled, but when I tell my daughter she's not allowed the screen now, she complains but eventually she'll start doing something else.
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.
> don't comment to complain about bad parenting if you haven't had kids or had 1 or 2 neuro typical, easy kids and a wife who did most of the parenting
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.
>University of Michigan professor Jenny Radesky, a pediatrician who has extensively researched screen use among children, said problems can arise when tablets are allowed to serve as a “child’s always-available buddy, meaning it is taken everywhere to help manage the child’s behavior, calm them down, or keep them quiet.”
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).
IMO even parents who use digital devices to pacify their children know they are making bad choices, but just choose to anyway out of convenience. This choice mirrors a lot which adults have to make these days, and fighting convenience requires strong will and sticking to principles. This is not something which comes naturally or easily to humans unfortunately.
My kids liked to watch Dora the Explorer and Sesame Street (before the age of YouTube). They had to catch it when it was on and when it was over, that was it. They had to go find something else to do. The scarcity made my job as parent a lot easier.
It’s a double edged sword to be able to watch things whenever.
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.
> bad choices
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.
Would you really compare a Kindle to a full fledged tablet with endless video and addictive games? I think you are being hard on yourself.
Kindles were the only devices that had a fully locked on ecosystem, yet no device lockin on the parent side (no need to keep an up to date iPhone just for the parental controls for instance)
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.
> Buying a kindle for my kid has been a decision that still pays dividends
Fair enough. I guess ignoring large swathes of industry research and government warnings must be a good tradeoff for an easier life.
> Fair enough. I guess ignoring large swathes of industry research and government warnings must be a good tradeoff for an easier life.
I have not come across any research saying ebook readers are bad. They are very different from general purpose tablets.
My issue is the quality of the research. IMHO not by fault of the researcher, but because of the subject itself.
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 ?
Its a mix.
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.
Parental training has not been the norm in most societies and most times. The problem in the modern west is that people lack the community and family support that helps parents. This combined with other things (lack of time with two parents working full time out of the house being usual, parental addiction to devices, etc).
> 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.
I think we broadly agree. I wasn't precise in what I meant by parental training. As you pointed out, in modern british cities, outside of the immigrant communities, parental duties are rarely communal. Moreover they are happening later and as you point out, away from family and other support groups.
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.
It's also a slippery slope. And a function of our society. We went in with the best of intentions and I'm now letting my toddlers watch 30 or 40 minutes of TV a day. It started with one quick work meeting that I couldn't reschedule or skip. Then they started asking for it, demanding it really. It has taken incredibly strong will to limit their watching to 30 or 40 minutes in the early morning.
I’ve built Tellybox to specifically control what and how long my kids can watch anything.
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.
I dont have kids (but may in the future) and one thing I'd like to do before then is get a NAS /plex server and build a kid friendly UI on top of it to keep them off of youtube/netflix/fire tv and greatly limit the content available to them to high quality vetted stuff. Acquiring the content for the server may be its own project in and of itself I admit. I also want to do this for myself too, but I especially want it should I have kids. I'm excited by some of the recent examples of hacking smart TVs too, which seems complimentary.
You don't even have to do it before you have children. You can wait until they are six or so and have the autonomy to pick what they want to watch (under your guidance). For children younger than that, you pick what they watch and when they watch it. Every time.
Do start hoarding the better shows and series you know.
I just threw infuse logged in as "kids" to Jellyfin which has curated kids stuff - and it's all tied to a custom home assistant timer profile that turns jellyfin access off at a particular time; there's a "door lock" in HomeKit that can be used to extent TV time past the normal cutoff if a parent decides, but since it's a door lock "hey Siri" can lock it, but not unlock it.
This is awesome, great work! I'll be back in a few years ;)
Clearly it's actually your LLM that built it, but still interesting!
Yes obviously it did. I have kids and a day job that takes up my time ;-)
It's not as if the kids who get the digital pacifiers are well behaved.
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!
Addiction brings out the worst in people; they're suffering and only become aware -- keenly aware -- between "fixes."
Have you considered that their actions could be a consequence of their continued and prolonged stimulation through digital pacification?
I think that’s exactly what the GP was saying
The parent comment said "It's not as if the kids who get the digital pacifiers are well behaved." which I was directly responding to.
The discourse on tablets for kids tends to degenerate into a very judgy, black-and-white debate of so-called “tablet kids” vs… not, which I find really reductive.
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.
> The discourse on tablets for kids tends to degenerate into a very judgy, black-and-white debate of so-called “tablet kids” vs… not, which I find really reductive.
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.
>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.
I usually try not to judge, people have family, commitments, gotta put food on the table. But. I genuinely wonder how people working at some of these companies that actively make the world a worse place live with themselves. This is basically, and obviously, child abuse in the implied usage. Someone might make a tablet good for education, but I don't think Amazon is structurally capable of doing it.
A few years ago this would have made the perfect April Fools joke.
(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).
> 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.
The real answer is not that companies are trying to please shareholders, it’s that they are trying to please customers.
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.
> I think talking about the "billionaire class" is more constructive than talking about "shareholders"
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.
Ethics is taught. Directly or indirectly (i.e. environmental/cultural). Also for some, a loss of an employment has significantly higher consequence than others.
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.
Everyone outraged at the companies while they are simply a product of the system. The outrage should be redirected to the system itself.
There should be outrage at both, but woefully it seems only a fraction of it trancends a company label.
I think the people who choose to hurt others for profit are basically psychopathic. No conscience. Lack of empathy or compassion. Inflated Ego. They're no different than muggers and rapists who are also willing to hurt others to get what they want, they just happened to end up finding a way to hurt people that they can (so far) get away with.
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.
That's exactly correct, The idea in itself isn't bad.
Amazon doing it will make it really horrible.
Unless this is 100 open source and ad/telemetry free? Right..
150 years ago, people used to pacify toddlers with "cordial" containing laudanum, better known as opium.
Today we're still doing the same thing, only the drugs hit is being delivered by other means.
Neoliberalism is at a state where moral shaming has very little effect. If you shame someone for trying to build a career or better themselves, you are the problem to a bigger extent than the person doing the previously morally bad thing. People's shame in a neoliberalist society comes from personal failures, such as not working hard enough, eating too much, not looking good enough, etc.
Have you considered that they are making the the world better and your process of measuring is flawed.
Take my upvote, that made me snort chuckle.
> I genuinely wonder how people working at some of these companies that actively make the world a worse place live with themselves. This is basically, and obviously, child abuse in the implied usage.
My guess: there are a lot more narcissists and sociopaths out there than you'd guess, and they bully the rest into submission.
Child abuse is practiced by the parents who end up deciding to use such a thing. Please don't shift responsibilities away from those who have them. If a parent makes such a decision, they are prone to also do other bad things to their children.
If somebody was marketing cigarettes for children, I don't think "only bad parents would buy these anyway" absolves the company for knowingly setting this situation up and profiting off it.
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.
You could appy the same hyperbole to alcohol. Yet America learnt 100 years ago that prohibition isn't really s solution. As much as you might hate it, there isn't really a way around people being responsible for their actions to a certain degree. Besides, comparing technology to heroin on a site like HN is pretty hilarious.
Gin is supposedly very calming for toddlers. Stressed parents used it a lot back in the day. I hear if you're fancy, cognac is even better. You gotta be a real hypocrite to drink a beer on fridays but not let your toddler have any, right?
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.
Thanks for underlining my point. Parents giving gin or cognac to their toddlers are just bad parents, a case for CPS, end of discussion. No need to regulate the gin industry just because there are hopelessly bad parents in the world.
but the fact that " Parents giving gin or cognac to their toddlers are just bad parents, a case for CPS, end of discussion" seems so absolutely self-evident to you has been brought about by a century of regulations, public education and resulting stigma/taboo. believe it or not, but giving (small amounts) of alcohol to toddlers and even infants (by way of drinking a shot before breastfeeding) was actually a shockingly widespread practice across many countries over 100 years ago. it took real effort by governments to get people to stop doing that and get us to a point where we are now - where such behaviour is self-evidently bad to anyone in their right mind and we've collectively agreed that it's in everyone's best interest that the state takes children of parents who do this to them into custody. it is not unthinkable that future generations, perhaps not even that far into the future will regard and regulate tablet/phone/[smart device] usage by toddlers in the exact same way.
"over 100 years ago", you wish. The last case I was personally told about was from the 1980s. Yet, regulations and/or taboo didn't help that child. A hopelessly negligent and stupid mother is just that, case closed. And that is pretty much my point. No amount of government regulation is really going to protect the children from the decisions their parents make behind closed doors. And pretending the responsibility is with evil large corporations or the government is only clouding the truth, namely that parents are responsible for their children and what they consume. I am sooo fed up with all these excuses. And I have reasons. My mother wasn't and still isn't the most rational person. And no amount of regulations would have protected me from her mental health issues. It wasn't the fault of the car industry that my mother told me at the age of 14 that she wants me to go with her on a car trip visiting my grandmother because she would prefer me also dying in case she had an accident. No amount of industry regulations would have protected me from the schock I had when I heard that sentence. Openly talking about the responsibilities of parents and not hiding obvious stupidity would have perhaps helped a bit.
> No amount of government regulation is really going to protect the children from the decisions their parents make behind closed doors.
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.
I believe that in marketing something to children, you become co-responsible for the usage situation you are promoting, even as parents share that responsibility. Marketing cigarettes, gin or tablets to children would be immoral in deeper ways than doing the same to adults. I stand by that.
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.
Nobody is marketing a "toddler pacifier" to children. The intended audience is PARENTS. Or do you actually know toddlers with enough financial power to buy their own tablets/whatever? C'mon, the cope is getting really hilarious. I don't really understand where this reluctance to make parents responsible for their decisions comes from? Is it a knee-jerk reaction of actual parents? Why is it so hard to accept that YOU are responsible for most of the things happening to your child until a certain age?
Nobody is saying parents aren't responsible for their choices, only that trying to influence them to make harmful choices via marketing is immoral and bad for society. The parents are supposed to give this thing to their kids as a pacificer, that is literally the proposed use case here. If you are trying to make money by encouraging people buying your cigarettes for their children, you are morally complicit in that outcome, regardless of all the purchases still being made by adults.
Marx explained how the division of labor alienates people from what they produce, from the act of production itself, from their human nature, and from one another. People are forced to perform mind-numbing, degrading, or *harmful tasks* simply to earn the wages needed to stay alive, reducing human life to a commodity
Marx was also an adulterer and refused to take responsibility for children he fathered so I don't think he's the best person to listen to in this situation.
Not agreeing with marxism here, but what you’re saying is just ad hominem. Marx could be a horrible person to his daughters and wife and still propose correct theory on economics. There are far more credible criticisms of his work.
Unsubstantiated gossip doesn't address the topic.
~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Marx#FamilyIn 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.Thank you for pointing this out. I wasn't aware it was disputed.
Disputed or not, it's still an ad hominem side show.
I'm neither of those bad things, can my economic theories and, in fact, all of my points of view and opinions, be taken seriously?
If not Amazon, someone else would ship this. At least if you ship it you can make it less shitty
Right, because it's profitable.
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.
> If not Amazon, someone else would ship this. At least if you ship it you can make it less shitty.
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.
I think we all understand capitalism is inherently flawed. I also think this a bit more nuanced than black and white.
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.
> The biggest issue with capitalism is that it rewards the people with no moral compass with power. ... 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.
This line of argument is popular bullshit.
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.
It's not obviously child abuse. If you go back 100 years old children were abused far more than we possibly could simply by malnutrition, disease, lack of shelter. Giving them something that may or may not harm them is not obviously child abuse.
> If you go back 100 years old children were abused far more
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?
Dunno if poverty (the things you mentioned) counts as abuse. This is closer to giving children cigs, but back then it was not recognized as harmful. Whereas we already know this technology is harmful.
> Whereas we already know this technology is harmful.
Technology is harmful, starting from fire and farming. So what?
Whataboutism.
Not really. More like, suck it up. Things might be harmful and beneficial at the same time. Worse is better. Technology shapes humanity. It's the humanity's role to adapt to the bad and benefit from the good.
Research has shown there isn't any ambiguity here. Stuff like this isn't good for adults, and is even worse for kids. So yeah, obvious child abuse.
wow what an endorsement
Jeff Bezos, our neighborhood crack lord. Thanks Jeff!
this is what the future will look like if the epstein-class wins: https://www.instagram.com/p/Dez_ma0xagT/?hl=en
Hah! I'm stoked for the premium oxygen sub with fewer commercials
Reminds me of George England's Air Trust: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/12826
"centering around the ambitious billionaire Isaac Flint who conceives a nefarious plan to monopolize the Earth's air supply. "
The sad part is that parents want this. They lack the skills, time, and/or motivation to entertain their kids in any other way. Its easier to just stick a screen in the child's face to avoid the difficulties of parenting.
This reminds me of the Kid Beer sketch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FepbNahnsE4
Cross-sectional correlational studies cannot establish causation and it's entirely possible (frankly, likely) that more deprived kids spend more time in front of a screen because their environments are less stimulating/interesting/safe.
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.)
This feels somewhere between an Onion article and one of those vintage ads for giving children cocaine.
I was thinking about what a great commentary Toy Story 5 was on this topic. I'm surprised Amazon didn't call their tablet a Lily Pad.
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.
Closer to the coke, unfortunately
… until your get to the political messages further down.
I don't know why anybody cares about this. If anyone's ever used an Amazon tablet, you'll know that the battery lasts 5 seconds, the animations are chunky, it's bloteful of ads and basically doesn't work. Save yourself some time and get an iPad. I have multiple times.
Cant build the matrix without the human-computer interface!
This is a hoax. Maybe a yes men production? I can't find any actual Amazon pages.
Maybe not in your country? Here in the UK I see https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/devices/new-amazon-kids-tab... and https://www.amazon.com/b?node=221942402011 which includes the phrase "One for ages 3-5".
That would be the best possible outcome. It initiated some good, robust discussion of nothing else.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FLB1NJPY#:~:text=Just%20add%20ki...
It's all right here. Just add kid.
> “Kids want a real tablet, not a toy,”
And they have them, like cheap Lenovos and whatnot.
> “Kids want a real tablet, not a toy,” the Jeff Bezos-founded company said in a press release
An almost verbatim line from Toy Story. Incredible. Only the main character was quite a bit older than 3.
I have a rule for gifts for my kids: no screens. Toys are so much more interesting than screens. They'll prob end up staring at screens their whole lives for work.
When I was a kid I had a toy robot that you could input a path into and it'd walk the path. Is that out of bounds for you?
Did it have a screen? Segmented displays may be allowed...
Was it a bee?
No, it was a toy robot... I just said that.
I guess I should have clarified that I meant a robot made to look like a bee...
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.
So basically real life Logo (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_(programming_language))?
I would have loved this as a kid!
Inspired by "Toy Story 5" ... It's amazing how catatonic my 7 year-old can become in a phone or tablet.
I can see how a tablet optimized for logic puzzles, e-books, drawing etc. could be highly beneficial but these adverts seem focused on the child's relationship with the tablet. I think an art/puzzle machine is a much healthier starting point than an everything machine.
Are these real ads? They look so very much like cigarette ads of the 1970s.
If you think this is a good idea, please tell my why, happy to discuss.
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.
A loaded question and I feel like people here including yourself are criticizing from the sidelines. Essentially the old "OMG you let your kid play on the phone!!! what a terrible parent!!!!". Although this isn't a phone, it's a device designed for kids with hopefully some apps that have a little more educational value than the typical phone apps.
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.
My wife and I are working parents. This is nightmarish. We know screen kids and they are not good around other people.
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 talk in this thread indicates absolutely no empathy for dual working parents and just repeats tired talking points.
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.
> Although this isn't a phone, it's a device designed for kids with hopefully some apps that have a little more educational value than the typical phone apps.
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.
In agreement, and I'push another point:
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.
I am a dual working parent. It is hard. I am not saying zero screen time.
This is still a terrible idea.
I think it's better to give them a movie rather than an algorithmic feed.
Parenting before the age of tablets and phones was a thing that seemed to work fairly well overall.
My wife and I sent our son to a remote "boarding school" type school near where we live in Japan. No phones or electronics beyond an mp3 player are allowed. We're so lucky it is cheap and readily available here.
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.
Curious about this school; I live in Japan with my family.
It's true and it's also true that parent's would be criticized from the sidelines for allowing kids, even from a very young age to sit in front of screens for hours on end when i was a kid.
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.
>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.
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 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.
This assumes TV and tablets are they same, they very much are not.
Your very point about them being more interactive is what makes them much more dangerous.
You can do whatever mental gymnastics you need to justify parenting decisions. But a static device located in a common area in the home is no comparison a device that follows a child everywhere which they stare at alone.
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.
> The talk in this thread indicates absolutely no empathy for dual working parents and just repeats tired talking points.
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.
At least you acknowledge some screen time unlike the puritans we have in this thread but i also suspect you're not in the most extreme of difficult parenting situations.
If you don't give kids a tablet and instead give them a stack of toys, the kids will grumble and eventually start playing with the toys.
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.
> i also suspect you're not in the most extreme of difficult parenting situations.
What do you mean?
The problems are tablet and phones. Apps are really bad, even the ones made for kids.
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)
The arbitrage will show up when kids raised without screens compete for the same college / job spots as kids raised by screens.
Did you read the article? It clearly references many research projects which show detrimental behaviour, bad temper, and poor attention spans undeniably linked to screen time in under 6s.
This is no different to our parents generation that used to tell us to stop watching TV or get off the games console (like a Gameboy). But this is besides the point.
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.
whenever I see a little kid with his head buried in a tablet / smartphone in a public place or when visting relatives / friends I start to wonder if this is what I looked like to my parents when I spent more than 1 hour playing on the family computer.
> This is no different to our parents generation that used to tell us to stop watching TV or get off the games console (like a Gameboy).
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.
> This is no different to our parents generation that used to tell us to stop watching TV or get off the games console (like a Gameboy).
Yeah, except for the part where it’s engineered to be as addictive as physiologically possible, it’s exactly the same!
Honestly, I respect different approaches for disabled kids. Must be very hard, I can't even imagine.
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.
> This is no different to our parents generation that used to tell us to stop watching TV or get off the games console (like a Gameboy)
Yeah, but they were right though?
If you think a vertical scroll slop tablet is the same as a portable game console, then why not just get them the console instead?
doing devil’s advocate here, because it does look like a nightmare.
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
Do notice that the big all powerful computer doesn't come with games and it's way more complicated to use, challenging the kid from the get-go.
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
Maybe desktop computers? But touch computers have been designed to be dead simple to use, I don't think jobs had uniquely designed the iphone to be simple enough for a child to use, but he did design it to be usable by people from other countries and cultures with no previous training, children being able to use these touch devices is at least a side effect.
I did mean desktop or laptop computers. Yes touch devices are like you described
Sudden lightbulb moment:
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)
I've personally tried to do use a tablet in a productive way for the child, and it's all about the apps rather than the tablet itself. Tablets for children (Android knockoffs, essentially) provide what's needed, that is, account controls.
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.
You are the parent, you can start at the IF. I'm attacking the premise, not the conclusion.
And I do respect the disclaimer, but lately my experience tells me the devil's advocates help the devil (and I'm an atheist!)
a big tech device/platform designed and algorithmically optimized to hit/increase corporate metrics with small kids as the subjects... hard to imagine anything more dystopian
maybe it'll help us raise good docile consumers and workers tho /s
Demand for products comes from the consumer, not the producer. This trend happened a long time ago, with parents giving their kids a tablet to avoid actually parenting.
Maybe it's making the best of bad parents
Not always. AI is being pushed on plenty of people. Let's just say that not all products serve consumers and there's room for regulation.
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.
I mean uranium can be a hazard to people around you, so I don't think that's an equivalent scenario.
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)
Amusingly, I totally bought Uranium off of Amazon ~7 years ago when I wanted to test my Geiger counter. Doesn't seem to be available anymore though? Sad!
This is also a great argument for low-tar cigarettes for children.
Do you have a strong argument against them?
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
You're asking if I have a strong argument against targeting children with tobacco products?
The existence of them, yeah. I don't think it's so clear cut that it'd be a net increase in harm. Advertising I'm not so sure about, but as for the mere existence of them:
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
You’re missing Group C, who didn’t offer cigarettes to their kids until their kids heard of these “healthy” cigarettes that are “safe for kids”
Juul was essentially this scenario.
Absolutely no cigarettes should be marketed to children. That doesn't mean various cigarette-adjacent products cannot exist.
The net harm result really only changes because the scope and numbers differ. I don't think I've ever met anyone who actually allows their kids to smoke, I see a lot who give them tablets though.
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 I get what you're saying, but it's really an unfortunate example.
I think it's still better to ban these obviously harmful things and to reduce exposure to them as much as possible.
I don't see what banning it actually accomplishes unless we totally ban tablets altogether. From the way I see it, it's the parents who are choosing to give their kids tablets in order to make their own parenting job easier. Am I wrong there? What do you ban to stop that happening?
This is basically the needle exchange argument. Except instead of just needles, you just want to hand out the drug.
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.
I don't really think looking at it through the lens of tobacco works. Parents giving their children tobacco and heroin aren't a thing. In reality many are self-motivated to give them a tablet for their own benefit, nothing much to do with the kid
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
I thought that people don't know what they want until you show it to them? They thought they wanted faster horsies but Amazon gave them noxious cars?
The demand was for transportation, not any specific product.
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.
They're going to use a device anyways because mom or dad are going to want to avoid parenting. Might as well give them something designed for them.
That's no reason to design devices that enable this parent behaviour. We should move in the other direction. Shaming parents who overly rely on giving kids devices for adults can be somewhat effective.
I know there's no hard leverage.
So.. stop producing smartphones / tablets? TVs? What's your other option?
Stop marketing to them to kids or normalizing kids using them?
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'm not saying go to zero. But definitely not over 3 hours and definitely not a dedicated device for them.
> Shaming parents who overly rely on giving kids devices for adults can be somewhat effective.
I'd like to hear more about the results you've gotten with this approach. How do you approach is this with your kids?
I don't have data, I don't run a study. Are you saying that shame is an ineffective mechanism of social cohesion?
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.
Oh, I was just trying to figure out how you were using shame to get other parents to change their behavior, since that's what you said worked. Wasn't looking for a study.
Oh, the usual: make sure they overhear "my kids would NEVER", look at them with a signature look of superiority, smh literally...
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.
> How do you approach is this with your kids?
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.
I am in the same boat as you, my kids have never had screens. However I do wonder that if by not teaching them to use tech sparingly at a young age, will they just fall down that hole at an older age when they are young adults?
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.
parents will do it anyways, so products that have child safety features are being developed
It's ridiculously hard to restrict all of the harmful content. And frankly, the big tech is less trustworthy by the minute.
I think by having adult devices parents will be more cautious and mindful of what they are granting to their kids.
LLMs could change all this - it's possible to quickly do pretty impressive analysis of the content of videos, games, and so forth.
I hope username checks out.
Leaving parenting duties to the overall average of the internet bound together by corporate scammers is not something I will ever do.
My only possible counterpoint in agreement is whataboutism. Companies make lots of devices designed for "negative" behavior.
Not an excuse but an explanation perhaps?
What bothers me the most is targeting children. I see why we need to make axes or chemicals. But these come with disclaimers and labels as well as common sense that they are harmful.
Enabling the avoidance of parenting incentivizes parents who would otherwise be parenting to also avoid parenting. I agree with OP, hard to see how this is a good thing.
> “Kids want a real tablet, not a toy,” the Jeff Bezos-founded company said in a press release announcing its Amazon Kids Tablets.
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)
I’m with you 100% on obsessively blocking ads. I cringe whenever I accidentally see one in someone else’s house. They’re just so transparently playing on our insecurities…keep that particular mind virus away from me. I buy as little as possible and I’m quite content with it, thank you very much.
Put AI on it an you have the future of upbringing.
you think this isn't gonna ship with some illegal data harvesting ai? oh sweet summer chile
It's funny how those same billionaires who sell these devices, do not give their children devices until the age of 14.
PS to parents: give your child a toy or a book not a tablet ffs.
I agree for age of 3-6 years, but until age 14 is ridiculous.
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).
The difference there is that you had a difficult, meaningful, constructive experience instead of one designed to just addict you. Even though both were running on von Neumann machines.
You brought me back to hand-drawing platformer puzzle levels for my fictional game as a kid. Good times.
I think there is a meaningful difference between an Intel 486 and a portable device like a tablet, especially if the former is not connected to the internet (or is connected to the internet as it was circa 1995). I think it could be fine and even beneficial to give a kid a desktop computer to write games using QuickBasic, and at the same time very harmful to give them a tablet.
Another thing to blame on the billionaires then. Soon they will become like gods, feared and blamed for intentionally causing plagues and famines when people dont appease them enough.
They certainly have more affect on our lives than any "traditional" god. Apparently, reducing their tax exposure brings 10 years of good harvest.
My kids must be losers - they still like books.
They might be because they don't get to build the muscle around how to control themselves in front of addictive software. It's an important skill to develop.
"My kids still like books" = "I'm not teaching them how to control themselves in front of addictive software"?
so, you mean they still let the kids use tablets then. I thought tablets were poison.
You seem to prefer flip "Ooh, gotcha!" responses as opposed to having an actual conversation.
Don't worry, Amazon still sells books
Written by LLMs and your kid will be the first human to ever read them?
It's a sarcastic comment
It's kind of gross that people think the screens for kids phenomenon is "avoid parenting" — a two working parent household has very little time for anything and it's incredibly stressful (good luck if you're a single parent).
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.
So, they screamed for 30 minutes. They're kids. I'm not gonna give my 4 or 6 year-old something that's gonna take a hatchet to their attention span just because they're doing a thing that's completely normal for that age.
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.
I can't imagine having to raise kids with both parents working. Good on you and your partner for holding the line on screen time in spite of the difficulty.
> 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.
I wish people should just avoid talking about using tablets on flights altogether.
It's a non-issue. Toddlers/kids maybe fly once a month max. Using tablets during that time is negligible.
I wonder what parents did for thousands of years before screens came along.
They smacked their children. Not sure if we want to go there.
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.
People just continued on with their chores and let their kids run about. Kids were way less supervised and were allowed to be on their own. As another poster said, physical punishment was also very common.
I guess thats why we are also now seeing epidemics of young people that cant cope with independent modern life without constant support, and massive rises in mental health issues of young adults.
spent significantly more time at home and with their community, "it takes a village" isn't just a cute phrase
kids also roamed on their own quite a lot more with other kids
How much of screaming kids, is bad parenting? None of the kids in dual working parent, or single parent households that I grew up with, screamed.
Yeah because each kid is different? Kids are not factory products that you can just quality control. Germany even has a law specifically allowing kid noises[0].
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/aug/16/germany-childr...
Generally speaking, with my three kids, if they act up and do that we take away the fun stuff. First it'll be the immediate reach toys, for my oldest, she'll have her tablet / game time taken away completely. My middle daughter, she loves to wear dresses, so we'll take those and put them in a separate container where she is not allowed to wear them (she has to wear normal t-shirt and shorts/pants). They hate it, but then forget it was taken away. Later they'll come crawling back and ask if they can have it back. This is when we ask them why we took it away and try to make it productive. It generally depends on what they did to get it taken away to begin with.
Probably not much.
have you spent any significant time with a child under 6
Yes, multiple kids under 6.
Even two spoiled kids, and yet those two didn't scream. I know the parents of those two kids a lot better, and I know they wouldn't give in to it which would just reinforce that behavior.
Did you try "the car won't go until you're quiet"?
Unfortunately "Sorry I'm an hour late, I had to sit at the side of the road until my kid stopped crying" isn't going to fly at work pretty much anywhere.
They were on the way to the dentist
My kids are far from perfect angels, but they do just fine on a 5 hour flight with some colouring books, a small container of legos (with pieces pre-chosen to be ones we're okay with losing), and then the excitement of getting to order ANY drink they want (from their point of view).
I have 3 kids and it has dramatically changed my world view. They are all very different, despite being raised exactly the same. 1 or maybe 2 would do fine for 5 hours with colouring books and legos. The third absolutely would not. We still limit screen time to almost nothing so I'm not necessarily arguing with your overall point. But my honest reaction to comments like this or, worse, from people who aren't parents, is you really don't know. I'm not a single parent but, yea, imagine raising multiple kids who aren't as easy as yours on your own.
This is the reality of parenting. I didn't believe it in my 20s when a manager at my company talked to me about this phenomenon, and then I parented more than one kid. It was a real eye-opener to live through what had only been an intellectual exeercise before. For a bunch of kids, the standard stuff works. Then there's the rest.
Every kid used to go on flights without a tablet. The only screen was the big movie screen at the front if the cabin.
Yeah and where do you think the stereotype of a child crying the entire flight came from.
Not sure why you’re getting so strongly downvoted. The travel situations are the ones I find the most reasonable for tablet use. It’s definitely possible to keep a kid occupied for a 5 hour plane ride without a tablet but it takes work. Very few adults can raw-dog a 5 hour plane ride themselves, ffs. I may judge other parents for allowing tablet use in other situations, but not on an airplane.
i bought an amazon tablet one time. it was absolutely terrible.
Warm take: a fantastic daily driver for adults as the intended market of the device means all activity on it is a priori subject to COPPA.
> One product design that concerned me was the handle — like it’s intended to be carried around like a briefcase
Has the extra benefit of getting them ready for the workforce. /s
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Flag me because it’s only acceptable to judge “those kind” of parents. Your decisions are valid and above reproach.
Somebody should study whether giving a smart device to a toddler increases their chances of getting ADHD diagnosis and medication at later age. Probably the answer is yes.
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.
From the article,
> 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.
The study doesn't claim causation. Instead of mobile device use causing executive dysfunction, it is more probable that the correlation is because mobile device use is more effective at calming down a child with poor executive function than a child with typical executive function. That's not to say it's a good way of calming of course.
Alas, you've received downvotes even though the substance of what you say is valid.
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).
The meta analysis study referenced in the article that covers 2.8 million kids in total did not find a link between screen exposure and executive functioning issues (or with math, science, reading, and a few other things). But I couldn’t tell from the summary what age ranges were covered.
> their chances of getting ADHD diagnosis
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.
It's on a spectrum, with many neurotypical people having traits of it. It can definitely be worsened or alleviated by environmental factors.
The current neurodevelopmental understanding sees the genetic component as latent tendency, with the environment as the trigger that can drive the manifestation of traits.
Using gen ai so I have been able to make bite size mini games for my son to learn letters and numbers. Today he said skeletons are just pretend given we’ve been walking around looking at Halloween decorations. So I’ve had to explain that skeletons are real and they’re inside all of us. So in these mini games, now I’ve added a 3-D rendering of the body for kids to show the skeleton and muscles and what a human body looks like. And I was able to walk them through it and explain it to him and he’s been very excited about the fact that now there’s this he understands there’s a skeleton inside of him. All that is to say, I think curated parent led experiences with technology are still a great way to teach, and we can’t just hand them an iPad and say here’s some shows to calm you down
I think that once parents become the OS devs specifically for their own children (or at least app devs) the tablet becomes less like a pacifier and more like a ball game between the toddler and parent, as each throws new stuff (metaphorically) at the other.
This is nice that you're walking them through it but I wonder why you'd need a tablet in the first place, then? It's better to sit with them in front of a monitor with the proper posture and viewing position.
Nice, you're managing a curriculum now.