It’s easy to judge from like 30 minutes in public, until you have an autistic kid and no support network.
Thank you for saying this. I used to judge parents of kids on screens until I had my own. You never know what’s going on and there’s a chance that the 30 minutes of quiet that family is getting from the iPad is the only peace they’ve had all day.
I mean there’s other things besides brain rot. Also people did raise kids prior to iPads.
Yes, parenting existed before iPads. That doesn’t imply that everything they used to do to cope with similar situations was correct, or better. Previous generations of parents used to do things that would terrify us now.
Or it’s the only meal they’ve had out in a month and it coincided with a sleep regression or something.
I have friends without kids tell me how they would parent and what they don’t think is “good parenting” all the time. They have no clue…
Yes, before the existence of iPads, autistic children could do nothing except scream and seize on the floor. Yep. Thank God we have iPads now, there is literally no other way to handle autistic children.
I mean, you’re kinda being a dick… it’s a better than my parents generations response to being autistic. Jesus lol, trust me.
Before modern era, they used to do lobotomies and lock up kids that are neurodivergent
No, keep proudly displaying your ignorance. We’ve got time.
Jesus Christ…
People when kids screech at a restaurant: ‘Must be shitty parents.’
People when kids run around at a restaurant: ‘Must be shitty parents.’
People when kids use an ipad at a restaurant: ‘Must be shitty parents.’
There’s no winning here. Children just aren’t allowed to exist.
We are the exception because we most definitely weren’t like that at all as a kid. /s
It’s when it’s A, B, then C with subway surfers on full blast for the rest of the meal then yeah the vibe sucks and I wish I wasn’t sitting near your kid.
#2 is shitty parenting. Kids running around a restaurant puts them and staff in dangerous situations with hot food and steak knives etc
I’m guessing it’s because the perception of people who don’t have kids have the thought “every time I’m in a restaurant I see kids on their parents phone/ipad so that must be what they do 24/7”, and I’m totally guilty of that too. Once I had a kid, I think me and my partner had a pretty good no screen time rule but when we wanted to go out to eat at a restaurant that rule was relaxed not just for us but for everyone else as well.
App suggestions make it so hard to keep kids away from slop. I started out only letting my toddler watch PBS Kids programs and a few other educational programs, but then your kids start seeing suggestions for all sorts of shlock, and they want to see the show with the superhero kitties is (it’s called Super Kitties and it is garbage). God help you if you try to watch something on YouTube; every suggested video is either low-quality home movies of people playing with toys (which is like crack to toddlers or weird shit like this that absolutely shouldn’t be on YouTube Kids but often is anyway.
Set YouTube kid to only show selected channels. My kid is actually bored of youtube now.
Holy shit, I did not know you could do that. That is going to be life changing.
Which channels did you select?
We did some shows that we both liked, like bubble guppies, sesame street, ABC mouse, cool school, paw patrol, peppa pig. Then there’s also some like packages that were okay like BBC and discovery kids, Disney channel. The most brain rot one we let them keep watching was pinkfong (baby shark).
So don’t give a tablet then. Or if you do, don’t have Apps like that. Get an wifi only android tablet, install VLC and specific shows and games. Real games and real shows. Not short form shit or bs mobile “games”.
I don’t give him a tablet, he only watches at home on TV (or a phone on very long car trips). I don’t know a toddler parent that has the time to download a curated media library for their kids, and even if you do have the time, things like that fall apart eventually. My wife and I managed to avoid most crap TV until we wound up in a hotel room with two dead phones and a fussy toddler, and that’s when we finally caved and put on Nick Jr. For a while, we managed to convince him that Paw Patrol was only available in hotels, but eventually he saw the thumbnail for it when we were trying to show him Dora the Explorer, and that beautiful lie finally died.
Paw Patrol is a regular length cartoon with a real, albeit basic, plot. I’m talking Cocomelon or Five Finger Family or other short form shit.
I don’t know a toddler parent that has the time to download a curated media library for their kids
No. Curating what your child consumes, both dietary and cultural, is the basic requirement raising a child. It takes very little tech skills to download files and load them on a device. Even just an old school portable dvd player and a disc wallet is preferable. The point isn’t to cut all media, but to cut the short form shit the drains attention. Even a show with a plot that takes ~22 minute to get to the end teaches some degree of patience.
Paw Patrol is empty calories. It doesn’t teach emotional regulation like Daniel Tiger, or shapes and colors like Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, or numbers, letters, and problem solving like Sesame Street. It’s not harmful like Cocomelon, and I’ve accepted that my son loves it, but that doesn’t mean it’s good.
Curating what your child consumes, both dietary and cultural, is the basic requirement raising a child.
Yeah, I curate what my child consumes, thanks, I just don’t have the time or energy to create a bespoke tablet of torrented kids shows to present him, or track down a circa-2002 portable DVD player and start a new physical media collection. If you’ve got that kind of free time, great, but I’ve just got to use the apps I’ve got, accept that he’s going to want to watch some shows that I find worthless, and make sure he doesn’t consume anything actively harmful.
Saying downloaded media or physical media collections are hard and fall apart is illogical considering that’s how everyone on the planet used to engage with media before internet streaming became such a huge thing
Except they didn’t. They mostly watched live TV.
Maybe that was the case where you grew up, the world is a large place and people live different lives, I grew up on bottleg and official CD’s and DVD’s, physical comics and novels, mp3 songs downloaded from limewire and torrented movies, friends and family would exchange flash drives and other media regularly for new content, all my content was both curated and organically found and diverse, and I consumed content from all over the world and my life was better for it. And I still rely on some of these methods to get my media, tech companies benefit from taking away ownership of things from people and packaging it as convenience, I’m not falling for that, I’m building my own home server now to host my own open source apps and services, it’s not even that difficult anymore.
Yeah, I was a teen in the early 2000s too. Most people still consumed most of their media through live TV. Anyway, you’re right, I should build a home server and start burning my own torrented DVDs. That’s the only reasonable solution to, “apps suggest crappy shows to my kid,” and it’s definitely the thing a parent of a toddler has the time to do.
Ted Ed, Vsauce, CGP Grey.
So them put some effort into acquiring good health media for your kid to watch and put that into the tablet and remove all other apps so they can only engage with content that has been pre veted by you, parenting takes effort
Yeah, thanks, I’m not looking for notes.
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Sees someone articulating the problem of streaming platforms elevating low quality or toxic media in children’s feeds.
You (a genius): “This is bad parenting.”
You’re on lemmy. Such hypocrisy.
Imagine portraying Homelander judging anything as an argument for agreeing with him.
Have you considered that that self awareness might be a level to the meme you didn’t recognize?
No. You didn’t. Because you’re the REAL Homelander! /S
Why are you approaching other people’s kids and take away their ipads?
I’ve recently gotten a hold of an older ipad. I’ve been installing apps and stuff on it and playing with all the things.
And godDAMN that os has problems. I’m back on my android phone and it’s so much smaller, but Jesus Christ having a back button and responsive apps and ui and os feels like coming home.
Android isn’t without its problems though. The apps are all definitely aimed at a poorer/cheaper demographic, the audio drivers suck big fat rectum, and the hamburger-scrolly-floating-button design philosophy is straight up garbage.
But there are so many missing QOL and presumably standard features on Android. On iOS, I get so lost in the loose ux standards that often end up bewildering me. I used procreate for like 8 hours today, and by the end, I had memorized a ton of really really bad designs. They work, and within the app, they’re… Mostly consistent. But I have this deep down rage for whoever made some of these decisions.
It’s entertaining, at the bare minimum, to see UX and UI slowly develop over the years, and neither OS (or Samsung’s OneUI) are perfect. It’s fascinating to see what the other camp is doing.
But yeah… Kids crying over having their ipad taken away? Shame.
Get them something better.
Like a desktop computer.
Well chosen character, sorry if that’s you.
Baby shark do do dooodododoododo
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I watch OneyPlays in my 20s
Our future. Get used to it.
When you’re
When
Fuckin squeakers
Good god this hits home
Months ago I was visited by a relative who brought their eight year old. She’s single and her boy is ever so slightly mentally not there. He’s smart enough but just not there with everything. Plus the mother is not capable of looking after him. So many wrong things and I hate to judge anything about it … both mother and son are having and will continue to have a hard life.
As we talked, the son spent the entire time with their device looking at YouTube videos.
At one point I wanted to try to make friends and asked him what he was watching … he mumbled and ignored me. I looked over at his video and it was just a completely nonsensical animation of characters running around like in a video game … I couldn’t understand what was happening or why, the cartoon animals were just mumbling nonsense, laughing, running and flashing lights and constant cuts to new scene after new scene. I looked at the kid and he was two steps away from just drooling.
I couldn’t believe it and it scared me. This device was melting any amount of brain power the kid had.
It made me think about myself and what the hell I was doing with my time.
It made me think that the world is all doing the same thing to one degree or another. Some are better, since are terribly worse.
It made me think that humanity is doomed.
Mechanisms of manipulation and control are getting more and more sophisticated and it’s really fucking sad.
Its like watching someone overdose. It sucks. And we don’t have language about it, even shitty language, like we do for drugs, so it’s hard to even talk to people about.
we have it. but its too technical and people seem to have developed an aversion to technical sounding things.
In my experience, it’s either anime characters and flashing lights/colors or some streamer screaming his head off. Both equally nonsensical.
I have friends with kids like that, and it’s scary. I’m obviously a fan of technology, but critical thinking might go down the drain if children spend all day in front of a screen at such a young age.
I genuinely think there should be a legal limit to when children are allowed independent access to JavaScript & Internet enabled technology. I would suggest twelve years.
Having it be law would remove probably the biggest reason children are drawn to technology initially today: social pressure and anxiety.
I didn’t grow up with anything like this (and I’m pretty young… or I was at some point) and thank fucking God I didn’t. I barely read today as it is, instead wasting time with screens and YouTube and shit like that; I’m happy I had the opportunity to consume hours and hours of time with reading as a child. Not just reading: I learned basically every knot that exists (I still have my copy of Ashley’s Book of Knots), learned an absurd amount of physics (with textbooks! for fun! I wouldn’t, couldn’t, do that today), learned to program and use Minix (ok, that was highschool, so a little later), and even got into Marxism.
These are all opportunities I don’t think I could replicate today, because I don’t get bored in the same way today. Now, if I’m bored, I automatically look at my phone (…lemmy…), or open YouTube, or do something else equally stupid. I didn’t have that option when I was young. We didn’t even own a TV. I was forced to do interesting things, and I’m really happy I was, because I’d be an exceedingly illiterate boring moron if I hadn’t read those novels and learned how the universe worked and understood why capitalism sucks.
Maybe I’m yelling at clouds and people will become interesting through other means, but it really frightens me how much dumber I’ve become. I don’t want to imagine how much harder it will be for masses of gen Z and Alpha.
Ok, I feel like I got a little off topic there. Rant over…
Adults today are, at least wherever Western media and culture has taken over, mostly mentally challenged and vacuous consumerists. What hope do their kids have? I feel bad for my future children, ngl, but they might die in the water wars regardless so maybe they won’t have to tolerate nonsense for long, lol.
That’s not developmentally normal even for a tablet kid, fyi. I would help them seek immediate evaluation…
I have a family member who was a tablet kid when they were 8. However they engage with me, their favorite thing is to play the addictive tablet game in my lap and they love when I or others play it with them, especially if you make a story out of it. They watch way too much YouTube but they were delighted when I watched with them, we did thumbs up and thumbs down and talked about what we were watching. They sat in my lap and while laser focused and addicted to the content, were also primarily engaging with me. They sadly are a bit attention starved from their neglectful parents but that’s a lot more developmentally normal imo.
This look is solely directed at the parents.
Not really, it’s a kid, it should know that by using the Ipad it is destroying it’s capability to pay attention in the future, not to mention using an Ipad, a product built in a Chinese factory with suicide nets, really the kid should feel ashamed for supporting such a business practice.
Yeah, time to start canceling toddlers!
and who gave the kid this iPad? Was it magically summoned into existence?
Only cowards use /s at the end of their sarcastic comments.
My bad.
