One of the things i dislike about the anti screen thing, is that they treat watching Beauty and the Beast and frigging Cocomelon as the same thing. One has a story, long shots, morals and teachings. The other has saturated colors and sub 1sec shots.
My kids grew up with some screentime (quality material, filtered). No YouTube, no streaming. One is a massive book reader, the other obsessed with crafts and building legos. They, from their own choosing, skip multiple days in row of TV, simply because busy playing together. No drama, no crying, no anger nor fits. They do well in school, are able to focus, sleep well.
They said the exact same thing about TV back in the 50s.
I doubt there were kids watching 16 hours of genuine brain rot content.
I have already viewed it that way for at least a few years now.
Wow, raising kids soley on hyperinteractive screens, not ever reading to them, not even potty training them, never exposing them to any kinds of constructive play or even just in person social activity outside of the home, leads to astounding developmental delay?
We’ve got numbers coming out of the UK now that like a third of kids entering school can’t eat or use the bathroom without assistance. Try to scroll on images and pages of paper, have never even encountered a book before.
Yeah, raising your kid on a screen and doing basically nothing else is child neglect.
Come on Beatriz, please tell us how to solution to this is age verification and deanonymization of everyone on the internet.
The only winning move is to not play. Spend less time on the internet, and build community irl. Seems kinda obvious?
Lmao the fuck it will. Technology enables you to not have to raise your kid, so the kids won’t be alright. Humanity has shown time and time again that we are not capable of handling these issues, we’d rather just kick the ball down the road or ignore it entirely. (See: climate change, rise of right wing fascism, the existence of capitalism, loneliness epidemic, etc.)
You are half right. We are capable, it’s just not profitable enough so the people who’s bottom line it would affect turn all their efforts into preventing us dealing with it.
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True that, also the type of screen and what their doing on it matters. For example a kid reading on a kindle or a kobo ia fine in my opinion. Reading Wikipedia or news in an ipad is fine. Scrolling through titktok is not.
Just block dump sites like tiktok and facebook and it will be fine. As long as you monitor the usage it is fine. The problem is parents don’t know how to do it.
Wait, when did we all stop doing the alcoholic baby thing?
Asking the real questions over here
Isn’t it already? Or am I living in some kind of parenting bubble? No one I know thinks it is ok to let their kids be glued to the screen. There are some parents (usually understandably exhausted single parents with multiple children under 6) who do put on kids music on youtube just so that they can tackle some acute problem or have a 10 minute break but otherwise no one thinks screens are great or even ok. It’s used as a last resort mostly. Isn’t that the norm? At least this is my experience for kids under 6.
Every time I go out to eat I see kids of all ages with their faces glued to a screen of some kind while mom and dad eat. Is that a last resort? It looks to me like laziness and a lack of engagement.
My wife and I went out recently and a nearby table had no less than three children each with their own tablets all on full volume while the 5 or so adults completely ignored this.
Three screens is bad enough but at least give them headphones. That is ridiculous.
Unless the same family eats out at that restaurant every day of the week, who are we to judge when we see this? Maybe they went out once in a blue moon and kids went insane but parents wanted to finish their meal. Maybe the kids had a long overstimulating day already and can’t handle a restaurant anymore but are also too hungry to go home at that point. Maybe the parents are scared of everyone around them judging if their kids don’t behave like 1920s kids who are too scared to even breathe in front of their parents. There can be multiple reasons for screens at restaurants and food courts and it’s not up to me or you to judge. Restaurants and going out are usually a special occasion and while I don’t condone putting your child in front of a screen when you are eating out, I don’t want to prematurely extrapolate to screen use at home.
I also want to add, when you say you see kids glued to screens every time you go out, are you sure you don’t see any who aren’t? Because I have this with dogs, I despise dogs and I spot a dog when there is one. While a place could be full of cats or rats or squirrels and I wouldn’t even notice.
I don’t know, I’ve always thought the point was to teach children how to act and socialize in public. It’s bad enough seeing adults on their phones when hanging out in public with friends instead of just speaking with one another.
There can be multiple reasons for screens at restaurants
I’ve never heard a good one except from parents who have children with some kind of severe handicap. I know exactly what it’s like to go to a restaurant with children of all ages and for almost everyone screens are not required, acting like a parent is. You can tell the difference.
when you say you see kids glued to screens every time you go out, are you sure you don’t see any who aren’t?
Yes I’m sure.
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The problem isn’t necessarily the screens. These screens are a portal into the entire collective knowledge of humanity, after all. There is so much information that, as recently as 30 years ago, was impossible for anyone outside small niches to access, which is now available in just a few seconds. It is nothing less than democratizing information. And connections between people have also gotten a lot easier. We take for granted now that we can talk with anyone in the world, at any time.
However, it’s the social media that these screens enable that is the problem, because they take the agency away from people. Inquisitive minds are no longer seeking out relevant information, they passively sit back and let the information come to them. Social Media sites hold engagement as their only value (just as TV media did before), and will shove absolutely anything in someone’s face to get them to keep scrolling. It doesn’t matter whether the content is enraging, uplifting, or even true: if it grabs someone attention long enough to see the ad, it is successful in their eyes.
We haven’t really put many restrictions on our kids’ screen time. (And how can I? I make my living looking at screens all day). But from the beginning, we have made sure our kids understand that we want them seeking content out, not passively consuming it. While the kids were younger, we only gave them access to social media like YouTube in a shared area, where we could see what they were watching and searching for, and watched with them. We curated their own mental algorithms, and if they stumbled on something we didn’t want them to see, we explained why. I can’t say they never succumb to brainrot, but they do seem to have developed the critical thinking skills that their peers have missed out on. (In other words, they know it’s brainrot when they see it, even if they watch anyway!)
She’s got it backwards: with the likes of RFK Jr in charge, dipping your entire child in alcohol will be deemed as harmless as using Facebook was before we knew better.
Making fun of fascists aside, there’s nothing inherently wrong with “screens” and oversimplifying the world into “screens” and “not screens” will harm children MUCH more than help them.
ESPECIALLY in the case of neuroatypical children whose burdens can be significantly lessened with smart use of technology or catastrophically multiplied by treating screens as harmful things to avoid when possible.
Why wait？
Dip a pacifier near you today!
In the future, they’ll wonder how awful we must have been to use education as a weapon to make Sociopathic Oligarchs wealthier.
