As always with that sort of conversation, I don't think "screen" is a valid category of interaction. Drawing on photoshop, watching a documentary on whales, playing bejeweled or using TikTok are very different activities that impact the brain differently.
My daughter is still young (2.5 years old), but I know that I'll let her play video games when she wants as long as it's as part of other activities in the day and that the games are ones that develop either her logic, creativity or motor skills.
Similarly, watching a quality show like bluey, or watching a full movie end to finish like Totoro in Japanese are watching activities I support, whereas watching some crap cartoon made to sell toys is not.
I think we can safely assume toddlers don't use photoshop, and don't play bejeweled. I also can't quite imagine them watching a nature documentary.
Video games won't develop motor skills, unless you find some tough games which require very fast hand-eye coordination at the child's level. Even then it's going to be very limited in comparison to e.g. drawing, throwing and catching a ball or playing a musical instrument. Creativity from video games is something I find even harder to believe. Logic is about the only thing that games manage to convey, but at that age, logic is weird. Toddlers can't reason well, and can't explain themselves.
A tablet or a phone is like candy to children. Be careful.
My 2 years 5 month old toddler uses Adobe fresco on my wacom tablet every now and then, she knows how to switch colours and draw, I erase the page every now and then for her.
She also watches every now and then "C'est pas sorcier", a french documentary series for kids that's pretty advanced (go into details of biology etc.), on all sorts of topics (nature, science, food etc.). That's also a good way for her to experience some French as we live in the UK and her only source of French are talking to me, or to her grandmother on the phone.
Just to be clear she does plenty of other activities, we cook together (she has a children's chef knife and uses it to cut things like tofu, carrots etc.), she draws on paper, she sings and dance, goes to the swimming pool weekly etc.
As for video game, that's more for later as she does not have yet the skills for that but at a glance
- Logic : Puzzle games, things like incredible machines, but also management game like sim-city.
- Creativity : Any sandbox game, the sims, minecraft, drawing game, sculpting game, animal crossing etc.
- Motor skills: Platformers, fighting games...
Essentially any game that requires a lot of effort for little reward, as opposed to games that makes you touch something shiny and shower you in visual and auditive feedback.
The thing that bothers me about game interactions is that they are designed to provide quick and easy positive feedback loops, unlike most real-world skills. E.g., learning the piano requires a lot of difficult persistence with uncertain feedback along the way--it's an entirely different experience than playing a video game, and I worry that conditioning our brains with games makes it harder for us to develop the patience and resilience that are required to develop those kinds of skills.
It depends on the game, but certain kinds of games have been shown in a number of studies to improve a wide array of abilities - from daily hand-eye coordination tasks [1] over decision making [2] all the way to problem solving [3]. The only question is if you want your kid to play COD or Starcraft, but the benefits are there and if your kid is not interested in learning an instrument, it's way better to have them play these types of games rather than some low mental effort smartphone attention sink.
Parenting is so tough to discuss. Nothing is ever a best (or even 'right') answer. I agree with this take, with a "yes, and" -
I worry about apps / video games for children also stunting imagination. Yes, in a game like Minecraft you can build anything out of blocks, or with Photoshop draw anything. However, the entire 'universe of outcomes' is inherently bound to the mind(s) of the developers, compared with a bored kid who's possibilities are limited only by their own imagination. Children are therefore pressed to stretch and practice creativity. Its not a perfect analogy, but I'm reminded of the theme in the Matrix movies of bounded outcomes.
I personally think creativity through raw boredom - rather than directed distraction (especially through digital devices)- is essential to mental development.
Really? Give super mario to a toddler watch as they get frustrated, cry and smash the controller with a huge tantrum.
And I'm not sure what videogames you play, but hand eye coordination needs to be really high.
something that's also overlooked is the level of reflexes they develop. In new super mario bros U, initially I would need to say "now jump" with roughly a 6 seconds anticipation before the actual jumo, now my toddler can jump properly in the first few levels.
Give it toa 5 years old and they are nowehere close to being able to do what he can do, so he must have developed something.
Of course you give them hard games, it's the same reason why you give them veggies and not candies. You give healthy videogames, not the garbage that goes on tablet and phones.
Oh and regarding creativity, my children played videogames, then got bored. With mum, they built a super mario level using duplo blocks and proceeded to play using the action figures we have.
Something strongly overlooked, is the level of focus required to play hard videogames, so something they develop is, indeed, focus.
And decision making! There is so much to decide in a videogame, often rapidly.
All of this happens in the same room as me, to be clear (still working), so I can see when they get bored and it's time for a change. Also they don't have access to the games, so they have a single videogame at a time with one change per day, which a great natural way to enforce focusing and getting bored if playing excessively
Video games can definitely have a lot of benefits over television. My son, who is the third of five, has played an online competitive FPS game since he was four years old. It’s had a number of benefits, including motivating him to learn to read at a much earlier age than his siblings. He wanted to learn to read so badly to play his video game that he can now legitimately just sit and read a book that he has never seen before, before he has even reached kindergarten.
Yeah for sure, MLP friendship is magic is there in the list of high quality show. It's unavoidable that toys are sold on popular francises, I just don't want show that are obviously just 20 minutes long advertisements with little substance.
There are not many cartoons made to sell toys that I know of. There is MLP, and .. Star Wars maybe?
And MLP is indeed a quite good show, fans ranging from Miley Cyrus to Gabe Newell.
Also I don't know how is it considered bad if characters are lovable (MLP has 50+ different, but lovable characters by design), or that if objects around her (clothes, mugs, toys, other merch) make her feel good?
My 3 year old doesn't have any screen time, and adults don't use their phones in front of him.
He plays happily by himself, and is always asking questions. People always compliment him on being well behaved, kind and very articulate.
It seems almost taboo to suggest it might be be something to do with the lack of screen time, but I can't help but think it plays a large role. I see how hard I struggle to deal with boredom and refrain from using my phone and I never want to inflict that onto a child.
Every single child is different, and parents love to extrapolate their own experiences on other children(I'm 100% guilty of this too).
But if we're sharing anecdotes:
- our (almost) 3 year old gets screen time(cartoons in the evening, just so I can cook dinner while my wife works), but speaks two languages fluently at this point, and understands when to switch between them.
- our friends 3 year old has zero screen time, very engaged parents, and knows like 5 words, babbles a lot otherwise. They've been for different consulatations about this and apparently it's completely normal, sometimes kids develop language skills a bit later and that's fine.
What I think is definitely related is parents giving their kids dummies after they turn one - I've seen kids as old as 3-4 years still using them, and I've heard about parents just doing it so "the kids stays quiet". It absolutely breaks my heart.
Yup this is a great point. I've seen plenty of kids (well, former kids) from my peer group who had strict screen time limits and are now the biggest social media users I know. Maybe they could have used a little more exposure earlier? Who knows.
My 3 year old is also frequently complemented on her language skills. She talks non-stop and is well ahead of other kids we meet in her vocabulary and use of language. She watches TV most days.
I taught myself English at age 5 from watching American television. To this day I sound like I was born in SF despite not spending more than 6 months total there in my life. Television, and internet TV in particular, is the most amazing tool if you start using it properly. I mean ffs, I have access to lectures by world experts in every field one click away. 50 years ago you had to go on a sabbatical for a year to have a chance of doing what I for an hour before falling asleep now.
I think part of it is that the generation who was never allowed to be bored is now raising kids, and so they believe that a perpetual state of being stimulated is the norm. And because kids in general are pretty boring little creatures, it only makes sense to distract them with screens of their own so you can go back to looking at yours.
If my daughter's around me I don't interact with my phone beyond the odd emergency - I'd rather play and talk to her. I'm not particularly anti-screen time (it's impossible to avoid, working in tech) but seeing what a lot of adults consider normal usage is terrifying.
I feel a lot of our generation take the attitude that screen time didn't harm us (hey, we've done ok) which I'm not sold on - I wonder sometimes how I might have turned out if I didn't spend so much time on video games or messing around online as a kid.
Same. Except my 3 year old watches quite a bit of TV and I frequently use my phone in front of him (the latter I am working on, the former I am not too bothered about within reason)
I think screen time is proxy for something else, maybe general parental attention. You can have plenty and watch TV, or have no screen time and no attention either.
A child's day is long and has very few responsibilities, there is plenty of time for attentive, creative playing even around an hour or two of screen time.
What will you do regarding schools, have you thought about that? Normally I'm not a control freak, but I worry that our hard work protecting him from the negative effects of screen addiction will quickly be destroyed if he's put into an environment where every other kid has a phone and is addicted to it.
I think you either home school or you give up and let things fall into place. One thing for sure is that although you don’t allow screen time you can’t expect that your kids aren’t going to be surrounded by kids taking about Mr Beast, Minecraft, etc. They are going to hear about it from friends and feel left out of conversations.
How do you do it? It is very, very difficult to not have screen time, in part because there are older kids in my house.
I’m more on the “quality of screen time” and “method of screen time” as my modifiable factors. Zero screen time seems (I cringe saying this) impossible.
Basically you don't use your phone near your child unless it's absolutely critical. That means - don't browse mindlessly, check social media, or news etc. Then all you have left is basically the occasional work related email that is urgent, which can probably be taken care of in mere seconds unless you need to action something.
I think there are levels of dedication, and parenthood expectations of what having a child is going to be like play a major role.
I'm going to be a father in a couple months and I'm observing most of my friends who did care about avoiding screens for their children give up partially on the idea because they've categorized it borderline impossible. I'm talking about parents who did deeply and seriously care about it prior having the kid.
Meanwhile I have two othwr friends who kinda got away with no screens. But i feel they do put a lot more effort for it.
So my take observing those samples: expectation management and be self-aware of how much sacrifice does it take.
If anyone has more adivice on this I'd appreciate too.
My 3 year old is holding conversations with adults, building 6+ legos, befriends my friends and has conversations quality conversations with them.
He uses ipad for games/shows at least once every 2-3 days.
There is a clear selection bias especially on HN, where a lot of people are quite intelligent and educated. Our offspring will have the same learning traits.
Not to discount what you're saying because I may be wrong here but could it be that, because your child is well behaved and can play happily by himself, you haven't had a need to give him screen time?
I can see parents giving their child a screen because of the fact they need to distract the child for a few minutes while they do something.
Like, what came first? The screentime or the good behavior?
Our son had no screen time and the odd bit of TV up until 2 years old. On his second birthday my wife thought it would be a nice idea to give him an amazon fire kids (because everyone else had one, though not sure how true that is!). A few things we observed:
1. Whilst there IS good content on there. A lot of it is complete nonsense. cocomelon, paw patrol, baby shark, AI generated rubbish etc. and quite a lot of the games are terrible. Toddlers don't know the difference between what is good and what is bad. You cannot monitor them effectively because amazon provides access to all content by default. He would quite easily get through 20-30 apps/videos in one sitting. That's a lot of different content!
2. Instead of reading, playing with his lego, wooden blocks, trainset or doing puzzles, his goto became the tablet. He wanted it at all meal times, in the car, and before bed. If we didn't give it to him, he had a meltdown. So we ended up giving it to him as we didn't have time to deal with the meltdown. Before the tablet, he didn't really meltdown at all.
3. Whilst he communicates well and talks a lot for a 2 year old. When using the tablet, he would completely zone out... "Would you like to eat supper?" ... tumbleweed. That's not great and aligns with TFA.
4. Not sure if correlated because there are lots of other factors at play but his bedtimes became a nightmare. He wanted the tablet, when before we read books like Mog the Cat or similar. Instead of being content with Daddy singing Jelly on the Plate, he wanted the horrid video on the tablet.
5. We live in a lovely rural area in the UK and he stopped wanting to go outside to instead play with the tablet.
6. Again, not sure if correlated but he became more irritable and restless after using the tablet.
7. He would complain there is nothing to do despite the availabily of toys.
And so... One day we told him the computer was broken. Mummy sent it to the factory to get it repaired. And... It's still being repaired to this day.
The first day was hell but now he's stopped asking for it and he's back to his normal self.
Perhaps we'll introduce it again when he's a bit older.
Horrifying but honestly seen the exact same thing happen every time.
Honestly don't understand parents who would swap the facade of "it shuts them up" when in reality you have kids who you can take to dinner and they'd happily just sit there with a coloring book vs the drama about how much charge they have left on their tablet and constantly having to tell them to put it down to eat.
Dunno starts to feel like a false economy where you're trading off acknowledging them elsewhere for a moment for every other interaction being amplified into drama mostly centered around the tablet, how much charge is on the tablet, when the tablet must be put down etc.
I know everybody has a suggestion to give and you should listen to nobody, but, if the time comes, give them a nintendo switch with Kirby star allies and yoshi's crafted world (and nothing else).
If videogames are something you want to allow, give the hard ones, they either get bored because it's hard or they learn
This website claims their program has 5th graders succeeding at AP math: https://www.mentava.com/
Kids are capable of more than we give them credit for. Adults are incredibly vain and infantilize their children to preserve their adult egos. Hands on experience and self paced learning across contexts is the key to education success. Not our dilapidated social institutions and reductive philosophy like avoiding screen time. Thats vanity speaking.
Talking with adults is highly engaging and interactive for children.
The same words and phrases get repeated and iterated over in varying orders and stresses in association with immediate touchable physical objects and executable actions.
A week of that would test higher for word|association retention than would a week of watching video with { words, words, words } streaming by non stop.
Yes, I do understand that there are videos and shows that are specifically designed to engage and teach young viewers: Playschool, Sesame Street etc .. but these require far more craft than goes into the vast sea of near AI generated pap that streams these days.
If you interact with babies, you'll notice that they are looking at you with an astonished intensity. That's because every neuron in their brain is trying to understand "What is going on!?"
Humans are copy-machines. We copy each other. Toddlers and infants especially so. They don't learn by just hearing voices, they need to see how these sounds are made by a real human being with a real voice-box and real lips and real tongue, in which context they are used.
Have you ever noticed gesturing while talking to someone on the phone? That's because we constantly try to enrich the words we are making with more context.
All that is missing if toddlers are just looking at a screen. It's devastating for learning.
They learn to hear (and understand) but they are not exercising speaking back, which is also important.
Also, the usual pattern of "parents shoving smartphone into kids eyes to keep them busy" is with very low volume, because parents don't want to hear the frickin' video sounds.
Is all vocabulary equal? After hearing American kids started talking with British mannerisms during the pandemic from watching too much Peppa Pig why would you risk your kid learning English from "Jonny Jonny Yes Papa" or "Finger Family" broken English slop videos
Not an expert, but I have the sense that some times toddlers do things just so they can interact with adults. Knowing that I get the sense that they might learn more from an actual person than from a screen everything else being equal.
My 8-9 year old niece can't speak because of this. Our language has gendered nouns and she can't differentiate between them. She would say Mister to a woman or Mrs to a guy. Or call a guy a she, but this isn't just the only problem, but the conjugations as well.
The problem of course lay with the parents. Not to mention they let her use a regular YT account, well her fathers to be exact and I found out my niece had bookmarked 18+ videos on YT...which I promptly deleted and installed YT kids only for her father to revert to regular YT...on which I then activated child mode or whatever it is.
You're not going to get anywhere trying to apply technical solutions to a social problem. Maybe see if the parents would be willing to get a cheap device just for your niece so they don't have to share?
My 8 and 10 year old are on normal YouTube a lot and screen in general and they’re excelling in elementary school.
But before school ages I socialized with them constantly. Built Legos, showed them SnapCircuits, read books, danced to music and used basic instruments, helped them with basic cooking like measure of ingredients.
It has nothing to do with screen and YouTube and everything to do with hands on practice across contexts.
Non-verbal, inept kids who did not get hands on mentorship have existed forever. There are more ignorant, inept parents in the world than geniuses. In the US only 14% of the public has more than a bachelors while polls suggest public believes it’s closer to 45%-50%
Like much of the world the majority in the US just aren’t that intelligent.
why are you trying to override her fathers wishes on a device he owns?
and don't tell me it's for the good of the child, if you really and truly believed that you'd call CPS. This feels like a 1-sided story from the perspective of a karen.
Important to note that the study[1] doesn't say what percentage of adult conversation this is, and doesn't analyse the effect on children's language skills.
I think we already knew that "When you're watching a tablet you're not talking to people." - what we're lacking here is any kind of useful detail.
Is 1,000 words 5% of what they might hear in a day? 50%? Seems important to know.
Does an hour of screen time reduce vocabulary by 5%? 50%? Increase it by 50%? Study doesn't tell us.
I suspect that doesn't tell the whole story you seem to be getting at, though. My guess is that people who will just hand a toddler a tablet to keep them entertained are probably those who would be at the lower end of that range anyway. The effects of a less linguistically rich environment on a child's language development are cumulative as well. Just saying "oh, 1000 words is 5-15% fewer words per day" seems to downplay the issue too much.
So 1,000 words from 6,000 is a huge amount, and you can definitely see how that would have a major impact. 1,000 out of 21,000 I'd be a lot less worried about.
I guess the message here is "Talk to your kids lots, when you have the energy to do so. That way they can spend their downtime however they fancy."
This article wasn’t what I thought it was going to be. There always seems to be a focus on the screen time children, and this seemed no different. From the title, I assumed this was going to be about the screen time of the adults raising those children. When adults are scrolling on their phone, they generally aren’t talking or interacting with the children around them, which must drastically reduce the number of words a child hears.
And if you're a parent and you're going to be on a screen, come out when the children want you. It's so easy to come out enough to say "uh huh", but they need you, not just a small fragment of your attention.
And that need is not just when they say something. Watch a kid play and they are constantly looking up at the adults in the room to see if they're paying attention and interested in what they're doing. Being lost in a phone isn't great feedback when the kids look up.
I'd be surprised if it were more than a few years before we got something like an "ai"-powered Tickle Me Elmo. The safety/alignment factor would obviously be extremely important, but there would be real benefit to a whole class of children and parents in having a patient and attentive conversation partner.
How many words are spoken onscreen? I was visiting while my friend’s kid learned to talk. The kid watched Toy Story’s Cars on repeat. I watched him day-by-day adding more and more complex turns of phrase directly copied from the film. Did that “Rob him” no it taught him to speak.
Readit News
My daughter is still young (2.5 years old), but I know that I'll let her play video games when she wants as long as it's as part of other activities in the day and that the games are ones that develop either her logic, creativity or motor skills.
Similarly, watching a quality show like bluey, or watching a full movie end to finish like Totoro in Japanese are watching activities I support, whereas watching some crap cartoon made to sell toys is not.
Video games won't develop motor skills, unless you find some tough games which require very fast hand-eye coordination at the child's level. Even then it's going to be very limited in comparison to e.g. drawing, throwing and catching a ball or playing a musical instrument. Creativity from video games is something I find even harder to believe. Logic is about the only thing that games manage to convey, but at that age, logic is weird. Toddlers can't reason well, and can't explain themselves.
A tablet or a phone is like candy to children. Be careful.
She also watches every now and then "C'est pas sorcier", a french documentary series for kids that's pretty advanced (go into details of biology etc.), on all sorts of topics (nature, science, food etc.). That's also a good way for her to experience some French as we live in the UK and her only source of French are talking to me, or to her grandmother on the phone.
Just to be clear she does plenty of other activities, we cook together (she has a children's chef knife and uses it to cut things like tofu, carrots etc.), she draws on paper, she sings and dance, goes to the swimming pool weekly etc.
As for video game, that's more for later as she does not have yet the skills for that but at a glance
- Logic : Puzzle games, things like incredible machines, but also management game like sim-city. - Creativity : Any sandbox game, the sims, minecraft, drawing game, sculpting game, animal crossing etc. - Motor skills: Platformers, fighting games...
Essentially any game that requires a lot of effort for little reward, as opposed to games that makes you touch something shiny and shower you in visual and auditive feedback.
> Creativity from video games is something I find even harder to believe. Logic is about the only thing that games manage to convey,
Kids playing Minecraft probably aren't building computers.
[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/095679761665030...
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187705092...
[3] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235367249_More_Than...
Deleted Comment
I worry about apps / video games for children also stunting imagination. Yes, in a game like Minecraft you can build anything out of blocks, or with Photoshop draw anything. However, the entire 'universe of outcomes' is inherently bound to the mind(s) of the developers, compared with a bored kid who's possibilities are limited only by their own imagination. Children are therefore pressed to stretch and practice creativity. Its not a perfect analogy, but I'm reminded of the theme in the Matrix movies of bounded outcomes.
I personally think creativity through raw boredom - rather than directed distraction (especially through digital devices)- is essential to mental development.
And I'm not sure what videogames you play, but hand eye coordination needs to be really high. something that's also overlooked is the level of reflexes they develop. In new super mario bros U, initially I would need to say "now jump" with roughly a 6 seconds anticipation before the actual jumo, now my toddler can jump properly in the first few levels.
Give it toa 5 years old and they are nowehere close to being able to do what he can do, so he must have developed something.
Of course you give them hard games, it's the same reason why you give them veggies and not candies. You give healthy videogames, not the garbage that goes on tablet and phones.
Oh and regarding creativity, my children played videogames, then got bored. With mum, they built a super mario level using duplo blocks and proceeded to play using the action figures we have.
Something strongly overlooked, is the level of focus required to play hard videogames, so something they develop is, indeed, focus.
And decision making! There is so much to decide in a videogame, often rapidly.
All of this happens in the same room as me, to be clear (still working), so I can see when they get bored and it's time for a change. Also they don't have access to the games, so they have a single videogame at a time with one change per day, which a great natural way to enforce focusing and getting bored if playing excessively
Most cringe episodes are the first and last two of the season, but the slice of life in the middle are more often than not golden.
But yeah, creating a curated library and not leaving it to chance would probably be a good idea.
And MLP is indeed a quite good show, fans ranging from Miley Cyrus to Gabe Newell.
Also I don't know how is it considered bad if characters are lovable (MLP has 50+ different, but lovable characters by design), or that if objects around her (clothes, mugs, toys, other merch) make her feel good?
Screen time for your child might buy you some free time, but is not a replacement for real interaction.
In 20, 30, 40 years I guarantee you will give anything to be able to go back and spend more time with your young child.
Children are not distractions from important work, they ARE the important work.
He plays happily by himself, and is always asking questions. People always compliment him on being well behaved, kind and very articulate.
It seems almost taboo to suggest it might be be something to do with the lack of screen time, but I can't help but think it plays a large role. I see how hard I struggle to deal with boredom and refrain from using my phone and I never want to inflict that onto a child.
But if we're sharing anecdotes:
- our (almost) 3 year old gets screen time(cartoons in the evening, just so I can cook dinner while my wife works), but speaks two languages fluently at this point, and understands when to switch between them.
- our friends 3 year old has zero screen time, very engaged parents, and knows like 5 words, babbles a lot otherwise. They've been for different consulatations about this and apparently it's completely normal, sometimes kids develop language skills a bit later and that's fine.
What I think is definitely related is parents giving their kids dummies after they turn one - I've seen kids as old as 3-4 years still using them, and I've heard about parents just doing it so "the kids stays quiet". It absolutely breaks my heart.
I feel a lot of our generation take the attitude that screen time didn't harm us (hey, we've done ok) which I'm not sold on - I wonder sometimes how I might have turned out if I didn't spend so much time on video games or messing around online as a kid.
I think screen time is proxy for something else, maybe general parental attention. You can have plenty and watch TV, or have no screen time and no attention either.
A child's day is long and has very few responsibilities, there is plenty of time for attentive, creative playing even around an hour or two of screen time.
What will you do regarding schools, have you thought about that? Normally I'm not a control freak, but I worry that our hard work protecting him from the negative effects of screen addiction will quickly be destroyed if he's put into an environment where every other kid has a phone and is addicted to it.
That’s giving me hope
It's the phone of other kids, they will not give their phones away
I’m more on the “quality of screen time” and “method of screen time” as my modifiable factors. Zero screen time seems (I cringe saying this) impossible.
Basically you don't use your phone near your child unless it's absolutely critical. That means - don't browse mindlessly, check social media, or news etc. Then all you have left is basically the occasional work related email that is urgent, which can probably be taken care of in mere seconds unless you need to action something.
I'm going to be a father in a couple months and I'm observing most of my friends who did care about avoiding screens for their children give up partially on the idea because they've categorized it borderline impossible. I'm talking about parents who did deeply and seriously care about it prior having the kid.
Meanwhile I have two othwr friends who kinda got away with no screens. But i feel they do put a lot more effort for it.
So my take observing those samples: expectation management and be self-aware of how much sacrifice does it take.
If anyone has more adivice on this I'd appreciate too.
It hasn't really been hard at all. He just gets involved in everything around the house. He helps cook and clean and look after his baby brother.
He uses ipad for games/shows at least once every 2-3 days.
There is a clear selection bias especially on HN, where a lot of people are quite intelligent and educated. Our offspring will have the same learning traits.
I can see parents giving their child a screen because of the fact they need to distract the child for a few minutes while they do something.
Like, what came first? The screentime or the good behavior?
My kids started with desktops, not phones, and with carefully chosen software - GCompris was the first thing I remember.
Boredom is often a good thing - it motivates you to find things to do.
1. Whilst there IS good content on there. A lot of it is complete nonsense. cocomelon, paw patrol, baby shark, AI generated rubbish etc. and quite a lot of the games are terrible. Toddlers don't know the difference between what is good and what is bad. You cannot monitor them effectively because amazon provides access to all content by default. He would quite easily get through 20-30 apps/videos in one sitting. That's a lot of different content!
2. Instead of reading, playing with his lego, wooden blocks, trainset or doing puzzles, his goto became the tablet. He wanted it at all meal times, in the car, and before bed. If we didn't give it to him, he had a meltdown. So we ended up giving it to him as we didn't have time to deal with the meltdown. Before the tablet, he didn't really meltdown at all.
3. Whilst he communicates well and talks a lot for a 2 year old. When using the tablet, he would completely zone out... "Would you like to eat supper?" ... tumbleweed. That's not great and aligns with TFA.
4. Not sure if correlated because there are lots of other factors at play but his bedtimes became a nightmare. He wanted the tablet, when before we read books like Mog the Cat or similar. Instead of being content with Daddy singing Jelly on the Plate, he wanted the horrid video on the tablet.
5. We live in a lovely rural area in the UK and he stopped wanting to go outside to instead play with the tablet.
6. Again, not sure if correlated but he became more irritable and restless after using the tablet.
7. He would complain there is nothing to do despite the availabily of toys.
And so... One day we told him the computer was broken. Mummy sent it to the factory to get it repaired. And... It's still being repaired to this day.
The first day was hell but now he's stopped asking for it and he's back to his normal self.
Perhaps we'll introduce it again when he's a bit older.
I don't want to come across as evangelical about it, but it is the best decision I think we've made as parents.
Honestly don't understand parents who would swap the facade of "it shuts them up" when in reality you have kids who you can take to dinner and they'd happily just sit there with a coloring book vs the drama about how much charge they have left on their tablet and constantly having to tell them to put it down to eat.
Dunno starts to feel like a false economy where you're trading off acknowledging them elsewhere for a moment for every other interaction being amplified into drama mostly centered around the tablet, how much charge is on the tablet, when the tablet must be put down etc.
This website claims their program has 5th graders succeeding at AP math: https://www.mentava.com/
Kids are capable of more than we give them credit for. Adults are incredibly vain and infantilize their children to preserve their adult egos. Hands on experience and self paced learning across contexts is the key to education success. Not our dilapidated social institutions and reductive philosophy like avoiding screen time. Thats vanity speaking.
The same words and phrases get repeated and iterated over in varying orders and stresses in association with immediate touchable physical objects and executable actions.
A week of that would test higher for word|association retention than would a week of watching video with { words, words, words } streaming by non stop.
Yes, I do understand that there are videos and shows that are specifically designed to engage and teach young viewers: Playschool, Sesame Street etc .. but these require far more craft than goes into the vast sea of near AI generated pap that streams these days.
Humans are copy-machines. We copy each other. Toddlers and infants especially so. They don't learn by just hearing voices, they need to see how these sounds are made by a real human being with a real voice-box and real lips and real tongue, in which context they are used.
Have you ever noticed gesturing while talking to someone on the phone? That's because we constantly try to enrich the words we are making with more context.
All that is missing if toddlers are just looking at a screen. It's devastating for learning.
https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/display/document/obo-97...
Deleted Comment
I wonder if the problem is children's programming.
The problem of course lay with the parents. Not to mention they let her use a regular YT account, well her fathers to be exact and I found out my niece had bookmarked 18+ videos on YT...which I promptly deleted and installed YT kids only for her father to revert to regular YT...on which I then activated child mode or whatever it is.
But before school ages I socialized with them constantly. Built Legos, showed them SnapCircuits, read books, danced to music and used basic instruments, helped them with basic cooking like measure of ingredients.
It has nothing to do with screen and YouTube and everything to do with hands on practice across contexts.
Non-verbal, inept kids who did not get hands on mentorship have existed forever. There are more ignorant, inept parents in the world than geniuses. In the US only 14% of the public has more than a bachelors while polls suggest public believes it’s closer to 45%-50%
Like much of the world the majority in the US just aren’t that intelligent.
and don't tell me it's for the good of the child, if you really and truly believed that you'd call CPS. This feels like a 1-sided story from the perspective of a karen.
I think we already knew that "When you're watching a tablet you're not talking to people." - what we're lacking here is any kind of useful detail.
Is 1,000 words 5% of what they might hear in a day? 50%? Seems important to know.
Does an hour of screen time reduce vocabulary by 5%? 50%? Increase it by 50%? Study doesn't tell us.
[1]https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/...
I suspect that doesn't tell the whole story you seem to be getting at, though. My guess is that people who will just hand a toddler a tablet to keep them entertained are probably those who would be at the lower end of that range anyway. The effects of a less linguistically rich environment on a child's language development are cumulative as well. Just saying "oh, 1000 words is 5-15% fewer words per day" seems to downplay the issue too much.
I guess the message here is "Talk to your kids lots, when you have the energy to do so. That way they can spend their downtime however they fancy."
Deleted Comment