I think kids access to electronics should be capped but I think some of the rhetoric around it gets a bit dramatic. He's just dreaming about something from his daily life.
If the kid kicked his foot like he was playing football would that say something about the negative effects of sport? What if he mimed turning the pages of a book?
Also doesn’t seem like he’s asleep so much as he’s pitching a fit and wants to use his tablet. This just looks like a young kid tantruming and squeezing his eyes closed in rage.
I would guess that his tablet was just taken away.
My wife and I are planning to have our first child soon and device addiction is something we’re worried of happening. I’m keen to hear from parents on HN how you go about managing devices with children. Do you have any recommendations, anecdotes, or resources?
Not advice, just a data point: my kids (4, 6) have unlimited access to screens and they’d much rather play Lego or go in the pool. When they’re on the screens it’s usually to do creative stuff like Minecraft or Mario Maker. I started off concerned about the same issue and it turned out, for us, to be a nothingburger.
Is advice: pick your battles. If you run yourself ragged trying to “do everything right” as a parent, and you’re underslept and cranky and falling short in engagement and behaviour, that’s what will affect them the most. Plus, parenting is more fun when you relax a little and ignore a good chunk of the anxiety being promoted by/for today’s parenting culture. I feel that most modern parenting advice is overzealous and far into the land of diminishing returns.
It depends. I have three kids. Given unlimited access one of them would never leave the screen. From March to June, he watched 684 shorts and videos on YouTube with his school issued Chromebook- that’s just during school hours. So, there are some kids who have an addictive personality.
We have tried to intervene, especially after he snuck an iPhone to his room and watched 22 hours of videos over the course of a week (while he was in bed) before we caught on. Nothing other than extreme measures of locking away devices keeps him from frittering away every waking hour on screens.
We've decided to give them (3, 5, 7) basically no screens except for occasional television. But I'm wondering whether it would be better to give them something creative that they could learn from instead of television. The middle one likes building (with Duplo) a lot [1].
When it comes to screens, have you tried anything apart from Minecraft and Mario Maker? What have they played Minecraft on? Did they start with those games and at what ages if I may ask? Looking at the "what's it" of Mario Maker my first thought was that it would be too complicated for them (starting out with screens), but I'm likely just underestimating them.
[1]: I was wondering about switching to Lego but I don't think these modern pre-made sets are all that good, in comparison to just regular building blocks.
> my kids (4, 6) have unlimited access to screens and they’d much rather play Lego or go in the pool.
Nothing is better than these "my kids are superior to yours" style posts, disguised as parenting advice.
While we're giving anecdata, my kids are precisely the opposite. They have ready access to a pool and an enormous box of legos as well, but if given unlimited access to screens, they absolutely WILL spend all waking hours staring at them.
We have two kids (4 & 6) and try to keep screentime to a minimum. There are some good apps out there (PBS, Khan Kids) in a sea of garbage.
Learn to use parental controls. My 6 year old has a YouTube Kids account, which is by nature limited to “kid friendly” content. But you can take it a step further, and limit their account to a whitelist of videos/playlists/channels you approve of. He’s only got access to a dozen or two videos and so he doesn’t get sucked into an endless stream of questionable content.
By preventing unlimited access, they often go seek other things/activities. They’ve stopped asking to watch shows and just go outside to play hockey or baseball, grab their markers to do some drawing/colouring, etc.. make it easy for them to drop into these alternate activities and the screens become less of a draw.
This all works for now, but I do fear as they get older and want to interact with friends online and whatnot. I’ve already seen some of their cousins who have more access show them stuff which they of course want to try. Not sure how long we can hold out before they realize that their iPad can do that too.
Parent of 4 and 2yo here. Our Kids share an activity on the iPad every morning before leaving for the day.
Avoid anything with dynamic ads. Apple Arcade is great for kids. PBS video is great. YouTube Premium if you want Ms. Rachel etc. we’ve had no issues with YouTube recommending garbage… it mostly “gets” that kids are watching now.
Make your own rules and stick with them. No iPad after 5pm or whatever.
Use your head and your heart. Undesirable behavior is undesirable behavior, regardless of whether a device is involved.
The worry du jour is screen time. Before that it was too much sugar. Before that it was too much TV. Before that it was too much sex. Before that it was too much counterculture. Before that it was too much pop culture. The list goes on and on and on and on and on.
The product being sold to parents is fear. And boy, oh boy do they have the antidote to sell you!
Having raised 3 kids it's mostly pretty easy:
- Make sure they're eating real food. They can have some junk food so long as they're actually filling up on real food.
- Ditto with water. Make sure they're drinking water. Limit (but don't eliminate) access to soda and apple juice.
- Make sure they're moving around and playing, preferably outdoors as much as possible.
- Make sure they're playing with other kids.
- Don't hover while your kids are playing. (Actually, try not to be a helicopter parent.)
- Let your kids handle their own disagreements.
- Teach your kids not to tattle. In our house it was the one tattling who got in trouble. Of course there are exceptions: blood, fire, property damage.
Everything else will largely work itself out. Just remember, your kids will mimic you - they will do what you do, not what you say. If you think they're consuming too much screen time, then take a look at your screen time. You want them to read more? Well, how much do you read? They're watching way more than they're listening and they have a keen sense for hipocracy.
I'll give a data point as a parent with an older child.
When they're younger it's not so bad. You can simply say "only 1 hour of screen time a day" and the kids don't put up a fuss. I even went a year without a TV and they just think this is normal because they don't have any other experience to compare it too.
At the Jr. High / High School level though it became difficult. Even when my son wanted to meet up with his friends in person and suggested things like going to the city park / mall his friends would decline and say "Why? Let's just hang out on Xbox." It wasn't even about playing Xbox, that's just where they hang out now. We even went so far as to build a game room and outfit it with multiple Xboxen, network switches, large TVs, etc. The kids still just preferred hanging out at their own homes and talking over headsets.
The only thing that ended up helping was we set a rule that he had to join two clubs at school. He tried a few different clubs and found two he liked. At one of the clubs they just happened to have a tradition of going and getting Boba afterwards and hanging out. He now has a decent group of friends that hangs out, in person, just talking.
My approach to keep kids from such addictions is to replace the phone with TV as much as you can. The TV (with YT) has a big difference compared to the phone. I tried it, and it was a game changer for my kids. I went even further by having selective content downloaded onto a USB flash and connecting it to the TV, so I don't worry about what YouTube has recommended, as it sometimes goes wild!
5yo, we let him choose up to one hour of 'want' (eg YouTube or sub service shows), then it's up to 2hr terrestrial TV max(often far less).
Weekends dad(me) and son will play upto 1 hour of his non-interactive game during not good outside hours(raid/dark).
Some times we will whip up a SNES emulator and play some DK or similar(taking turns mum, dad, son) until the preset lives are out.
We mix this with lots of outside play(at least an hour a day), where he and I play with balls, throwing toys, climbing equip etc.
This is at 5. At 4 we had a NES emulator and Super Mario, half time and half tv time.
When the weather is good we go swimming in the ocean, or some other outdoor activity.
He had a smartphone(offline) for controlling the Chromecast but after seeing him passively swipe while watching tv made me remove that.
I plan to move him through consoles as I did, at an accelerated pace, and his first PC will have many sub optimal parts which he can work off to 'earn' upgrades. If he can figure out how to install them.
At the same time, I will be teaching him to hike, surf, fish and whatever else he likes.
Is this hard? Hell yeah, I'm freaking exhausted XD
We avoid using devices around ours, don't let her watch videos during meal time, esp. the low quality ones, eg toy unboxings, hypnotic nursery rhymes, etc. We will give her other activities when we need to distract her, be it coloring, stickers, kinetic sand or something else. We even went on 7-8 hour long trips in car without a screen, just some papers and stickers. On the other hand we've witnessed the effects of "screenism" with our friends kids. Sometimes they will throw a tantrum or won't eat until they get their dose of screen entertainment. The only exception from an early age for us was video calls with grandparents, so our kid associates phones with video calls but not watching cartoons. We also prefer to let her watch full length animated films on TV, eg disney (frozen, tangled, etc). We usually won't let her watch short term brain numbing yt content, except for a music video, funny cat compilation sometimes (more as a shared activity), but this only became a thing at 2yr old or thereabout.
Not a parent but I want to give my opinion anyway (I'm in my early 20s), my parents allowed me to use devices with minimal management; I can use them only after I finish homework (I used to do them right after I come from school as a workaround though :), I can't use them while eating and before sleep. I might have been using them for an unhealthy, but still acceptable, amount of time, not by today's standards though, times change.
The most important thing is who you surround your child with, if all their friends spend their day on their phones, your son will probably try to do the same thing, however, as my friends used to spend time playing outside, I did the same. So not only your rules that matter, but also the environment.
Another thing to be aware of is that the internet changed, I grew up with flash games, a fun little way to kill time when you're bored, nowadays short-form video content is taking over, ads are everywhere and political ideologies are injected into everything, so one should be more careful of what kids are watching.
This is something I've tried to figure out this week.
I tried Youtube Kids because I wanted the content to be pre-approve only, I liked the toddler friendly controls, and the app can go in single app mode on the iPad. It's subscription, which is fine, but the main problem is they won't let me approve the content I want. I can see some great kids stories and learning videos in our language on regular Youtube, but can't seem to find a way to get them into the Youtube kids app. (And I certainly am not going to turn her loose on regular Youtube.)
There don't seem to be any other apps that do what I want so I ended up setting up a Plex media server and use yt-dlp to download the videos for her. This works pretty well, but is a lot more work. And the app is not great.
I have a two year old. She hasn’t used phones or tablets yet. We don’t even let her watch TV. The most she’s done is use our phones to play Spotify.
Overall, it seems to be working really well. She’s super curious, and she loves to read and go outside. There are some downsides for you, as the parent, however. You can only watch TV after the kid goes to sleep, so no more watching live TV. You also have to be engaged with your child most of the time. Sometimes, it would be so nice just to sit her down for 30 minutes and go relax, but you have fewer options to do that without TV. She is actually pretty good at entertaining herself, but those stretches of self play aren’t predictable or controllable like putting a TV show on is.
I have 5 kids age 8 and under. The get electronics are a reward for good behavior like any other. The default is no electronics or TV. If they do something to earn some time with them, they can have them. Things they can do (nothing counts if we have to ask them to do it):
- Clean up their messes or their rooms
- General housekeeping/chores
- Worksheets from their workbooks (they all have workbooks from the next grade up)
- Reading a chapter or so in a "chapter book"
- A couple of other learning/development activities (Soduku, puzzles, etc.)
If they do one of those things on their own, they get electronics for a bit, or some other treat (candy, etc).
So far it is working well, especially the worksheets. The first two kids are in grade school, and teachers are consistently impressed with them.
The easiest thing is to just say no. It’s ok to tell kids no sometimes. Our kids don’t get regular access to phones or tablets for free time. We have some of the cheap Amazon Fire kids tablets that stay in the closet at all times and only come out for long road trips/flights. Our oldest is the only one in school and they have a school issued iPad, but they only get to use that for school work and at home it stays off otherwise. It’s worked out pretty well so far.
I’ve got two kids (12&9) - I think the main thing is balance, let them have devices but teach them that there are time for devices and times for no devices.
If you severely restrict them then they will rebel, if you let them on all the time they will be sucked in.
Keep them well away from social media as much as you can.
Teach them they can brush their teeth or go to the toilet without their phones (you need to live this too and be a good role model)
We never used the tablet, until we went on holiday recently with our 20 month old. By necessity she was eating up late with us (normally asleep by 7:30ish at home). Tablet was employed to maintain sanity.
Had a bad effect - became very demanding around it, tantruming for it (which we hadn't seen before). (very nearly) Cold turkey again on the tablet now!
Anecdote: If you are going to give such a device, turn on colour filtering, and make everything black and white. My hunch is that this reduces surprise, which means you avoid pitfalls of dopamine circuits.
Stand up for what you believe in, and don't give them devices. (I have young kids of my own, and am very much not looking forward to this aspect of parenting).
I mean, the child had a nightmare or something and it was related to the tablet movement. That's all we know. It could have used the tablet once.
My child (2) this morning started crying while asleep and saying "pista", which refers to railway track (not sure if the wooden or the real one).
I get the sane info from it.
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If the kid kicked his foot like he was playing football would that say something about the negative effects of sport? What if he mimed turning the pages of a book?
I would guess that his tablet was just taken away.
Is advice: pick your battles. If you run yourself ragged trying to “do everything right” as a parent, and you’re underslept and cranky and falling short in engagement and behaviour, that’s what will affect them the most. Plus, parenting is more fun when you relax a little and ignore a good chunk of the anxiety being promoted by/for today’s parenting culture. I feel that most modern parenting advice is overzealous and far into the land of diminishing returns.
We have tried to intervene, especially after he snuck an iPhone to his room and watched 22 hours of videos over the course of a week (while he was in bed) before we caught on. Nothing other than extreme measures of locking away devices keeps him from frittering away every waking hour on screens.
The other two kids don’t have similar issues.
We've decided to give them (3, 5, 7) basically no screens except for occasional television. But I'm wondering whether it would be better to give them something creative that they could learn from instead of television. The middle one likes building (with Duplo) a lot [1].
When it comes to screens, have you tried anything apart from Minecraft and Mario Maker? What have they played Minecraft on? Did they start with those games and at what ages if I may ask? Looking at the "what's it" of Mario Maker my first thought was that it would be too complicated for them (starting out with screens), but I'm likely just underestimating them.
[1]: I was wondering about switching to Lego but I don't think these modern pre-made sets are all that good, in comparison to just regular building blocks.
Nothing is better than these "my kids are superior to yours" style posts, disguised as parenting advice.
While we're giving anecdata, my kids are precisely the opposite. They have ready access to a pool and an enormous box of legos as well, but if given unlimited access to screens, they absolutely WILL spend all waking hours staring at them.
Deleted Comment
Learn to use parental controls. My 6 year old has a YouTube Kids account, which is by nature limited to “kid friendly” content. But you can take it a step further, and limit their account to a whitelist of videos/playlists/channels you approve of. He’s only got access to a dozen or two videos and so he doesn’t get sucked into an endless stream of questionable content.
By preventing unlimited access, they often go seek other things/activities. They’ve stopped asking to watch shows and just go outside to play hockey or baseball, grab their markers to do some drawing/colouring, etc.. make it easy for them to drop into these alternate activities and the screens become less of a draw.
This all works for now, but I do fear as they get older and want to interact with friends online and whatnot. I’ve already seen some of their cousins who have more access show them stuff which they of course want to try. Not sure how long we can hold out before they realize that their iPad can do that too.
[0]https://www.humanetech.com/
Avoid anything with dynamic ads. Apple Arcade is great for kids. PBS video is great. YouTube Premium if you want Ms. Rachel etc. we’ve had no issues with YouTube recommending garbage… it mostly “gets” that kids are watching now.
Make your own rules and stick with them. No iPad after 5pm or whatever.
Use your head and your heart. Undesirable behavior is undesirable behavior, regardless of whether a device is involved.
The product being sold to parents is fear. And boy, oh boy do they have the antidote to sell you!
Having raised 3 kids it's mostly pretty easy:
- Make sure they're eating real food. They can have some junk food so long as they're actually filling up on real food.
- Ditto with water. Make sure they're drinking water. Limit (but don't eliminate) access to soda and apple juice.
- Make sure they're moving around and playing, preferably outdoors as much as possible.
- Make sure they're playing with other kids.
- Don't hover while your kids are playing. (Actually, try not to be a helicopter parent.)
- Let your kids handle their own disagreements.
- Teach your kids not to tattle. In our house it was the one tattling who got in trouble. Of course there are exceptions: blood, fire, property damage.
Everything else will largely work itself out. Just remember, your kids will mimic you - they will do what you do, not what you say. If you think they're consuming too much screen time, then take a look at your screen time. You want them to read more? Well, how much do you read? They're watching way more than they're listening and they have a keen sense for hipocracy.
So, congratulations and good luck!
When they're younger it's not so bad. You can simply say "only 1 hour of screen time a day" and the kids don't put up a fuss. I even went a year without a TV and they just think this is normal because they don't have any other experience to compare it too.
At the Jr. High / High School level though it became difficult. Even when my son wanted to meet up with his friends in person and suggested things like going to the city park / mall his friends would decline and say "Why? Let's just hang out on Xbox." It wasn't even about playing Xbox, that's just where they hang out now. We even went so far as to build a game room and outfit it with multiple Xboxen, network switches, large TVs, etc. The kids still just preferred hanging out at their own homes and talking over headsets.
The only thing that ended up helping was we set a rule that he had to join two clubs at school. He tried a few different clubs and found two he liked. At one of the clubs they just happened to have a tradition of going and getting Boba afterwards and hanging out. He now has a decent group of friends that hangs out, in person, just talking.
Weekends dad(me) and son will play upto 1 hour of his non-interactive game during not good outside hours(raid/dark).
Some times we will whip up a SNES emulator and play some DK or similar(taking turns mum, dad, son) until the preset lives are out.
We mix this with lots of outside play(at least an hour a day), where he and I play with balls, throwing toys, climbing equip etc.
This is at 5. At 4 we had a NES emulator and Super Mario, half time and half tv time.
When the weather is good we go swimming in the ocean, or some other outdoor activity.
He had a smartphone(offline) for controlling the Chromecast but after seeing him passively swipe while watching tv made me remove that.
I plan to move him through consoles as I did, at an accelerated pace, and his first PC will have many sub optimal parts which he can work off to 'earn' upgrades. If he can figure out how to install them.
At the same time, I will be teaching him to hike, surf, fish and whatever else he likes.
Is this hard? Hell yeah, I'm freaking exhausted XD
The most important thing is who you surround your child with, if all their friends spend their day on their phones, your son will probably try to do the same thing, however, as my friends used to spend time playing outside, I did the same. So not only your rules that matter, but also the environment.
Another thing to be aware of is that the internet changed, I grew up with flash games, a fun little way to kill time when you're bored, nowadays short-form video content is taking over, ads are everywhere and political ideologies are injected into everything, so one should be more careful of what kids are watching.
I tried Youtube Kids because I wanted the content to be pre-approve only, I liked the toddler friendly controls, and the app can go in single app mode on the iPad. It's subscription, which is fine, but the main problem is they won't let me approve the content I want. I can see some great kids stories and learning videos in our language on regular Youtube, but can't seem to find a way to get them into the Youtube kids app. (And I certainly am not going to turn her loose on regular Youtube.)
There don't seem to be any other apps that do what I want so I ended up setting up a Plex media server and use yt-dlp to download the videos for her. This works pretty well, but is a lot more work. And the app is not great.
Overall, it seems to be working really well. She’s super curious, and she loves to read and go outside. There are some downsides for you, as the parent, however. You can only watch TV after the kid goes to sleep, so no more watching live TV. You also have to be engaged with your child most of the time. Sometimes, it would be so nice just to sit her down for 30 minutes and go relax, but you have fewer options to do that without TV. She is actually pretty good at entertaining herself, but those stretches of self play aren’t predictable or controllable like putting a TV show on is.
- Clean up their messes or their rooms
- General housekeeping/chores
- Worksheets from their workbooks (they all have workbooks from the next grade up)
- Reading a chapter or so in a "chapter book"
- A couple of other learning/development activities (Soduku, puzzles, etc.)
If they do one of those things on their own, they get electronics for a bit, or some other treat (candy, etc).
So far it is working well, especially the worksheets. The first two kids are in grade school, and teachers are consistently impressed with them.
If you severely restrict them then they will rebel, if you let them on all the time they will be sucked in.
Keep them well away from social media as much as you can.
Teach them they can brush their teeth or go to the toilet without their phones (you need to live this too and be a good role model)
Devices and eating don’t mix when it is communal, end of.
Had a bad effect - became very demanding around it, tantruming for it (which we hadn't seen before). (very nearly) Cold turkey again on the tablet now!
Make it as boring as possible.
if you give a kid a screen with creative stuff / Mario Maker installed, that's what they'll play
if you give them a screen with Youtube installed, that's what they'll watch
i think the goal should be to curate their experiences, as zealously as a museum curator manages their exhibitions
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My child (2) this morning started crying while asleep and saying "pista", which refers to railway track (not sure if the wooden or the real one). I get the sane info from it.
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