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AnotherGoodName | on: Amazon’s “digital pacifier” for toddlers
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.

alt227 | parent | next
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.

jjulius | parent | next
>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.

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phatfish | parent
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.