I usually try not to judge, people have family, commitments, gotta put food on the table. But. I genuinely wonder how people working at some of these companies that actively make the world a worse place live with themselves. This is basically, and obviously, child abuse in the implied usage. Someone might make a tablet good for education, but I don't think Amazon is structurally capable of doing it.
A few years ago this would have made the perfect April Fools joke.
(Continue down below for an amusing rant - trigger warning maybe?)
Now it’s just part of insatiable corporate greed and the current sad reality.
I wonder if Zuck lets his girls use Instagram all day long or if Andy would gift his own toddler (if he had another one) this beautiful tablet. Probably not, he’d have a full time nanny to keep the kid busy.
Alas, these folks are the symptoms and the real problem is systemic folks. Companies are chasing targets to please…drumroll…the shareholders. Yes, each one of us holding index funds are also culpable. It’s a SNAFU. We’ve been sucked whole into the system and escape is hard (especially with the newly proposed Dell bank account for kids that can only be used to invest in stocks).
It's not obviously child abuse. If you go back 100 years old children were abused far more than we possibly could simply by malnutrition, disease, lack of shelter. Giving them something that may or may not harm them is not obviously child abuse.
> If you go back 100 years old children were abused far more
I don't understand the argument here. 100 Years ago they were abused more, but last year they were abused less. So increasing the dosage of the abuse is ok as long as it doesn't exceed your random benchmark of 100 years ago?
Dunno if poverty (the things you mentioned) counts as abuse. This is closer to giving children cigs, but back then it was not recognized as harmful. Whereas we already know this technology is harmful.
Neoliberalism is at a state where moral shaming has very little effect. If you shame someone for trying to build a career or better themselves, you are the problem to a bigger extent than the person doing the previously morally bad thing. People's shame in a neoliberalist society comes from personal failures, such as not working hard enough, eating too much, not looking good enough, etc.
> I genuinely wonder how people working at some of these companies that actively make the world a worse place live with themselves. This is basically, and obviously, child abuse in the implied usage.
My guess: there are a lot more narcissists and sociopaths out there than you'd guess, and they bully the rest into submission.
Marx explained how the division of labor alienates people from what they produce, from the act of production itself, from their human nature, and from one another. People are forced to perform mind-numbing, degrading, or *harmful tasks* simply to earn the wages needed to stay alive, reducing human life to a commodity
Marx was also an adulterer and refused to take responsibility for children he fathered so I don't think he's the best person to listen to in this situation.
There are lots of wildly profitable enterprises that we regulate or make illegal.
If everyone else is selling boiled orphan elixir, you'd be leaving money on the table not to boil yourself some orphans. But maybe we decide that boiling orphans isn't an industry we want as a society, and legislate consequences for doing so.
> If not Amazon, someone else would ship this. At least if you ship it you can make it less shitty.
I'm sure someone's thinking that, and it's a bullshit rationalization. Don't turn yourself into a villain because you think someone else might beat you to it.
Also, if true, it's a stark indictment of capitalism, and how it pushes people towards malign and harmful activities.
The sad part is that parents want this. They lack the skills, time, and/or motivation to entertain their kids in any other way. Its easier to just stick a screen in the child's face to avoid the difficulties of parenting.
Get kids an old computer. They prefer something big they can see, with switches that make a resounding clunk, and drives that make clanking noises.
To a kid, playing games from the 1980s off a floppy disk is not a significantly difficult experience than using the very latest technology, but I suspect the former is far better for their developing brains.
Meanwhile, you can get them to learn how to type on the keyboard and learn the basics of needing to type in commands to make the computer do something, which is a lifelong skill - tapping icons on a tablet is not.
A toddler needs manipulative toys to develop patience and motor control. Blocks to stack, puzzles to fit together, balls to throw and catch, books with pages to turn. Nothing electronic at all.
I was thinking about what a great commentary Toy Story 5 was on this topic. I'm surprised Amazon didn't call their tablet a Lily Pad.
I recently watched Toy Story 5 on a long flight. I almost felt it should come with a trigger warning - I thought it was a spot on, brilliant yet inherently depressing commentary on our current relationship with tech.
(Minor spoiler alert) One of my favorite scenes was when a slew of toys were running through a house with a family inside. Normally in the Toy Story world when a human see the toys they need to "play dead", but since all the humans were glued to their screens they could run by unimpeded.
No we don't, and propagating this myth is damaging to people suffering that need that medication.
Many medications behave extremely differently under different dosages, delivery methods and variants.
To quote an ex of mine who was a school psychiatrist, "oh, ADHD meds are addictive are they? I wish someone would tell that to my kids who keep on forgetting to take them."
I'm not a parent, but don't parents give their kids tablets all the time? The number of toddlers I've seen walking around with tablets glued to their faces makes me uncomfortable, but they're actually just ipads or android tablets. This product seems to me like just another tablet, with a slightly different build for kids.
I'd guess any parent who is already planning on giving their kid a tablet would get this but any parent who is against it will not? I'm not sure this product in isolation increases the number of tablet viewing toddlers.
If you’re not a parent, you're probably only seeing children in places which are not designed with children in mind - places where there’s no place to run and play, and kids have to be quiet.
In those places you have to pacify child somehow, a lot of parents use digital entertainment. If you go to child friendly places, you would see it much less.
Our child has maybe 1 hour of tv a week, but if someone sees them only on a plane, they would guess it’s an iPad kid.
IMO even parents who use digital devices to pacify their children know they are making bad choices, but just choose to anyway out of convenience. This choice mirrors a lot which adults have to make these days, and fighting convenience requires strong will and sticking to principles. This is not something which comes naturally or easily to humans unfortunately.
My kids liked to watch Dora the Explorer and Sesame Street (before the age of YouTube). They had to catch it when it was on and when it was over, that was it. They had to go find something else to do. The scarcity made my job as parent a lot easier.
I looked hard into the question but all the litterature I got was a mix of "I'll give you candy if you do X" experiments that beg the obvious "what if the kid doesn't want the candy for whatever reason ?", including their mood while doing the experiment. And this goes on for every detail of the experiments.
And the rest was philosophical and hypothetical "it's not like the olden days" style of conservatism, mixed with "this time it's different" to try to barrage criticism.
Testing on kids is just hard, so coming up with good experiments is in itself a PITA. I wish people would recognize that and take the research with shovels of salt (and I don't see misleading research as better than nothing).
Buying a kindle for my kid has been a decision that still pays dividends, I would have kicked myself if I refused it on social pressure.
It's also a slippery slope. And a function of our society. We went in with the best of intentions and I'm now letting my toddlers watch 30 or 40 minutes of TV a day. It started with one quick work meeting that I couldn't reschedule or skip. Then they started asking for it, demanding it really. It has taken incredibly strong will to limit their watching to 30 or 40 minutes in the early morning.
I’ve built Tellybox to specifically control what and how long my kids can watch anything.
It has a visual indicator (sun going down) that tells them how long they have remaining and that works quite well to remove any discussions (well… screaming and shouting)
I dont have kids (but may in the future) and one thing I'd like to do before then is get a NAS /plex server and build a kid friendly UI on top of it to keep them off of youtube/netflix/fire tv and greatly limit the content available to them to high quality vetted stuff. Acquiring the content for the server may be its own project in and of itself I admit. I also want to do this for myself too, but I especially want it should I have kids. I'm excited by some of the recent examples of hacking smart TVs too, which seems complimentary.
It's not as if the kids who get the digital pacifiers are well behaved.
Usually my kids are sitting quietly at the table and playing with their little cars or whatever while some kid is melting down that he ran out of roblox or his game isn't working.
I've literally seen kids that are 9 or 10 act this way in public! Like little babies!
I have a rule for gifts for my kids: no screens. Toys are so much more interesting than screens. They'll prob end up staring at screens their whole lives for work.
Screens are horrible. I am absolutely not on the side of screens in general and Amazon deserves this attack. But please don't comment to complain about bad parenting if you haven't had kids or had 1 or 2 neuro typical, easy kids and a wife who did most of the parenting. You really don't know. Really.
I don't know why anybody cares about this. If anyone's ever used an Amazon tablet, you'll know that the battery lasts 5 seconds, the animations are chunky, it's bloteful of ads and basically doesn't work. Save yourself some time and get an iPad. I have multiple times.
The discourse on tablets for kids tends to degenerate into a very judgy, black-and-white debate of so-called “tablet kids” vs… not, which I find really reductive.
Tolerance of tablet use is a spectrum ranging from the aggressively Luddite tech elite shielding their children from their own creation all the way to the 6-year-old posted up in the basin of a grocery cart dual-wielding their ruggedized tablet running Minecraft and their parents’ phone cycling through YouTube slop.
In my experience, most people fall somewhere in the middle, i.e. “we’re on our 4th hour in coach class, I’m tired of pretending this animal-themed card game is fun, and I know this isn’t development-maxing right now but we’re gonna do it for an hour to preserve our sanity and that of those around us”.
That being said, the problem with these ads is that they normalize tablet use as something that’s just another (even desirable!) part of everyday life, not a tool of last resort.
> The discourse on tablets for kids tends to degenerate into a very judgy, black-and-white debate of so-called “tablet kids” vs… not, which I find really reductive.
Some of the kids in my neighborhood derisively called another kid a "tablet kid" because he'd rather stay inside on his tablet than go outside in the summer and play.
Personally, tablet time is reserved for airplanes and trains. We also have a color eink android tablet that is hooked up to Libby and isn't used for anything else but reading.
TV screen time is limited to watching shows together with one of us, or when my son is sick.
Video/computer games are always played together.
Same goes for movies, movies are always co-watched, we sit through the movie, pause and discuss what is going on, I'll ask about why people are doing certain things, what emotions different characters are having in a scene, and so forth.
Somebody should study whether giving a smart device to a toddler increases their chances of getting ADHD diagnosis and medication at later age. Probably the answer is yes.
If shitty parent's don't care about well-being of their children, they could at least consider the cost of future medication, not to even mention likely worse performance in school and job market.
> While observing 422 children ages 3 to 5, a 2022 study led by Radesky found that mobile device use for calming — in other words, a digital pacifier — was associated with “decreased executive functioning and increased emotional reactivity.” (Executive function refers to memory and problem-solving skills needed for everyday life. Emotional reactivity refers to poor impulse control in response to stress, pain, and other negative feelings.)
The study doesn't claim causation. Instead of mobile device use causing executive dysfunction, it is more probable that the correlation is because mobile device use is more effective at calming down a child with poor executive function than a child with typical executive function. That's not to say it's a good way of calming of course.
This is no different to our parents generation that used to tell us to stop watching TV or get off the games console (like a Gameboy). But this is besides the point.
I feel it's great, but then I use Google Kids on the Fire, because Amazon's app is junk in comparison.
And also, my kid is (disabled) autistic and non verbal and this keeps them calm and happy.
Honestly, I respect different approaches for disabled kids. Must be very hard, I can't even imagine.
Other than that, movies and games are less destructive than algorithmic feeds, especially short form video. It is preferable to move outside or read a book. But I think we're comparing vegetables to candy to cigarettes.
A loaded question and I feel like people here including yourself are criticizing from the sidelines. Essentially the old "OMG you let your kid play on the phone!!! what a terrible parent!!!!". Although this isn't a phone, it's a device designed for kids with hopefully some apps that have a little more educational value than the typical phone apps.
The talk in this thread indicates absolutely no empathy for dual working parents and just repeats tired talking points. If anyone here looks back on their own childhood perhaps they actually had similar freedoms? Hell i used to play the Apple 2 obsessively from a very young age. I credit it as formative in a positive way.
You can argue that if you're both working and no one has 100% time to dedicate to raising the child they shouldn't have children but that argument leads to plummeting birth rates.
I say all of this as someone who doesn't have kids but I have at least some sense of how freaking hard it is and in the grand scheme of things a tablet designed for kids isn't the worst thing.
Tell me why an alternative that's at least better than a phone is so bad? If you want to argue a phone or any such device that keeps kids occupied for some time is unacceptable i think you're waaaaay out of touch.
> Although this isn't a phone, it's a device designed for kids with hopefully some apps that have a little more educational value than the typical phone apps.
HAHAHA no its not. Amazon Kids+ is an endless stream of product tie in mass market commercial junk content.
The quality has gone down over time (amazingly), curation doesn't exist, and discoverability of the little bit of good content that is there is pretty much impossible.
My wife and I are working parents. This is nightmarish. We know screen kids and they are not good around other people.
Our kids use tech - Nintendo Switch, tv, raspberry pis, and yes, even a tablet for things like train or plane rides. But they absolutely did not get this as a toddler. Yes we were tired. Yes it was hard. Parenting isn't easy.
> The talk in this thread indicates absolutely no empathy for dual working parents and just repeats tired talking points.
I am a dual working parent. We dont own a tablet and our kids never get handed phones. The kids occasionally watch Bluey and Peppa pig on the TV (live not apps).
Your Apple 2 days were very different to the algorithms and feeds of today. Giving a kid a phone loaded up with the Youtube Kids app is literally like feeding them crack.
> criticizing from the sidelines
You dont even have kids, why do you have such a strong opinion on what real parents are saying about bringing up their own? You are the one criticising from the sidelines whilst us parents are making the tough choices in bringing our kids up.
Single working parent families were still busy as hell in many circumstances. Even with a single kid there has always been a social push to control (historically)women's time and make them try hard to be good wives/mothers. I include socializing and engaging with their community to be part of it.
Nobody ever had the time or energy to watch after a kid 24/7 while dealing chores, paperwork, the rest of the family etc.
> The talk in this thread indicates absolutely no empathy for dual working parents and just repeats tired talking points.
My kids get no more than 10m of tablet time a day each. Both of us are working full time. When they ask for more I point them to their toys/books/etc, or play with them.
So, being dual working doesn’t mean you have to allow your kids to have lots of screen time.
Did you read the article? It clearly references many research projects which show detrimental behaviour, bad temper, and poor attention spans undeniably linked to screen time in under 6s.
doing devil’s advocate here, because it does look like a nightmare.
IF my kids were to have access to a tablet, I would prefer it be a tablet specifically desgined for kids, rather than a commodity all powerful generic computing device and OS
What about if I just handed my kid a linux machine and put a 30 min cap on YouTube time via the router. (tiktok etc all just banned)
That might go some way to reproducing the kind of friction we experienced growing up with PCs...
Edit could even start with some on-device parenting apps. What about a local LLM powered to classify videos as slop/educational. More power to them if they figure out how to disable it (I'll add more restrictions after a brief honeymoon period)
Do notice that the big all powerful computer doesn't come with games and it's way more complicated to use, challenging the kid from the get-go.
Also they have to learn to use a mouse and a keyboard to do that. You probably forgot how hard it was to learn to use both. Double clicking was really hard for me as a kid
I've personally tried to do use a tablet in a productive way for the child, and it's all about the apps rather than the tablet itself. Tablets for children (Android knockoffs, essentially) provide what's needed, that is, account controls.
Problem is: there is a limited amount of apps that are genuinely fun and educative. If Amazon wanted really to do something truly educative for children, they'd build a whole market for it, the marketese I see in the article doesn't support that.
a big tech device/platform designed and algorithmically optimized to hit/increase corporate metrics with small kids as the subjects... hard to imagine anything more dystopian
maybe it'll help us raise good docile consumers and workers tho /s
> If you think this is a bad idea, please tell me why, happy to discuss.
There are several reasons. The most important one is that children (ab)using highly stimulating devices don't learn to be absorbed by or find reward in less stimulating ones (most importantly, books). It's exactly the same risk as giving addictive drugs to adults.
This is not theory. Just look at children whose parents give them mobile phones/tablets as pacifiers - they become easily restless.
The intellectual argument is also important. Gamified learning is nice on paper, but one can imagine what children are actually going to play.
Related to another post: the difference between a child and an adult who plays videogames is that the latter has (hopefully!) learned "slow" skills, so they can choose pastimes like this deliberately.
Having said that, I'm for forbidding children from using this type of thing, but it's a very dangerous slippery slope, and there's lots to work on before that step.
Demand for products comes from the consumer, not the producer. This trend happened a long time ago, with parents giving their kids a tablet to avoid actually parenting.
That's no reason to design devices that enable this parent behaviour. We should move in the other direction. Shaming parents who overly rely on giving kids devices for adults can be somewhat effective.
Enabling the avoidance of parenting incentivizes parents who would otherwise be parenting to also avoid parenting. I agree with OP, hard to see how this is a good thing.
> “Kids want a real tablet, not a toy,” the Jeff Bezos-founded company said in a press release announcing its Amazon Kids Tablets.
Kids don't fucking know the difference you dirty fucks.
Amazon going full Facebook-at-their-worst. Nice to know.
I'm going off on a big tangent here, but hear me out (or ignore me entirely because there's political content, but in a practical context - I think). Humans don't need much of an excuse to reach for an easy answer, and parenting on its own is probably one of the most difficult undertakings in the human experience. "Modern life" is becoming increasingly complex to navigate, we are bombarded with attention sucking ... everything, giving us the sense that time is so scarce that the easiest, most immediate answer is the only option. This is being made true as much for parenting - give them the electronic device - as it is for work problems - MVP, band-aid, temporary becomes permanent.
Amazon product and marketing is an accelerant of this. Encouragement of the ever decreasing time frame of what is already ridiculous short-termism. Amazon are obviously not alone in this, but neither are they working against it or wanting to leave any possible addiction-money profit on the table. This is one of the reasons I'm obsessed with blocking advertising. The more they can convince you of the importance of "all the things" the more of their things you need to buy to create more time for yourself - at the expense of your child. Nice, Jeff. Nice.
On the quality of parenting: My children's grandparents, on both sides of the family, have been a great help. I guess we've been lucky in having them available, but also (maybe accidentally) smart in not moving away from the local support network of family in order to pursue better/bigger/higher-income careers. Where this relates to the above is that, the pace of life, in combination with having children, almost requires a family support network, more specifically grandparents since they're likely retired or in the twilight of their careers and therefore have more time flexibility. Something that's become increasingly obvious to me is the 'life' advantage bestowed upon those with a local family support network over those without. This is something that often puts migrants well behind locals where my anecdotal-only example is someone I used to work with who had three kids but no extended family, and therefore school drop-offs, pick-ups, doctor's appointments and all the other general activities and emergencies that go with having kids is spread out over two people (mum and dad) rather than a full extended family network.
The point I'm trying to make is that this marketing of electronic pacifiers to parents is a symptom of the (unsustainable) increasing 'urgency' of the pace of modern life, which can be made manageable with a decent extended family support network. The advantages of which are compounding.
Something I heard that really stuck with me was: Children form most of their behavioural patterns by the age of three (or maybe it was 5), and so those early years are the most important in shaping them. It requires less work to get something right the first time, than having to fix something that's broken. This isn't to say things can't go wrong, but what it means is to do your best for those years to have a chance at being able to reclaim more of yourself at a later stage.
Ultimately, if you "just give them the tablet" now, you'll be "just giving them the tablet" for the rest of your life.
/ridiculously tangential rant (just had to get some of the thoughts written down to see how they turned out)
I’m with you 100% on obsessively blocking ads. I cringe whenever I accidentally see one in someone else’s house. They’re just so transparently playing on our insecurities…keep that particular mind virus away from me. I buy as little as possible and I’m quite content with it, thank you very much.
They might be because they don't get to build the muscle around how to control themselves in front of addictive software. It's an important skill to develop.
I agree for age of 3-6 years, but until age 14 is ridiculous.
Not all devices are equally bad.
I've been happily learning to code my own video games on Intel 486 PC in QuickBasic since late elementary school (age 10), and yes, I played outdoors with other kids too.
Before I had PC of my own, I was making them on paper (game design and mechanics, not literal code).
The difference there is that you had a difficult, meaningful, constructive experience instead of one designed to just addict you. Even though both were running on von Neumann machines.
Another thing to blame on the billionaires then. Soon they will become like gods, feared and blamed for intentionally causing plagues and famines when people dont appease them enough.
It's kind of gross that people think the screens for kids phenomenon is "avoid parenting" — a two working parent household has very little time for anything and it's incredibly stressful (good luck if you're a single parent).
Yeah sometimes you want your kid to not scream the whole time in the car or on a 6 hour flight where everyone will hate you. My 4 year old niece once screamed for the entirety of a 30 minute car ride because she didn't like what color socks she was wearing, you can't talk yourself out of these absurd situations sometimes and distractions help. I'd love to give a book in these situations, but half the time it just gets thrown at your head.
Why does no one say "parents need more time and space" or "parents need help making effective choices in a world that constantly demands more of them" everyone loves crawling out of the woodwork to tell you how horrible you are.
So, they screamed for 30 minutes. They're kids. I'm not gonna give my 4 or 6 year-old something that's gonna take a hatchet to their attention span just because they're doing a thing that's completely normal for that age.
That drive fucking sucks ass, don't get me wrong, but oh well, that's part of life - the kid has to learn that sometimes shit's not gonna go their way and they have to figure out how to get over it. I'll be damned if I'm gonna teach them that the way they can calm themselves down and regulate their emotions is by the sweet, sweet blue hue of a tablet.
We're a two working parent household and we keep screen time limited to a short amount of TV time. We'll expose them to screens more and more so that we can properly educate them over time, sure. But man, I don't get the whole, "even a two working parent household barely has time for anything and is stressful," bit because - yeah, that's exactly what parenting is.
Parenting is hard. It's exhausting. If you don't have a village, the onus is on you to do it right. That's what we've signed up for, is giving our all to our kids until they're out on their own. That's what we're supposed to do. It's not supposed to be easy, it's a constant stress the likes of which you will never know until you're in it. But we're here, so let's do the hard work and do it right. We owe it to them.
Edit: You're right, we need time and space and the ability to make good choices, but neither of those should come at the expense of my kids.
Yeah because each kid is different? Kids are not factory products that you can just quality control. Germany even has a law specifically allowing kid noises[0].
My kids are far from perfect angels, but they do just fine on a 5 hour flight with some colouring books, a small container of legos (with pieces pre-chosen to be ones we're okay with losing), and then the excitement of getting to order ANY drink they want (from their point of view).
I have 3 kids and it has dramatically changed my world view. They are all very different, despite being raised exactly the same. 1 or maybe 2 would do fine for 5 hours with colouring books and legos. The third absolutely would not. We still limit screen time to almost nothing so I'm not necessarily arguing with your overall point. But my honest reaction to comments like this or, worse, from people who aren't parents, is you really don't know. I'm not a single parent but, yea, imagine raising multiple kids who aren't as easy as yours on your own.
Not sure why you’re getting so strongly downvoted. The travel situations are the ones I find the most reasonable for tablet use. It’s definitely possible to keep a kid occupied for a 5 hour plane ride without a tablet but it takes work. Very few adults can raw-dog a 5 hour plane ride themselves, ffs. I may judge other parents for allowing tablet use in other situations, but not on an airplane.
They smacked their children. Not sure if we want to go there.
If a kid made a scene in public back in 1950, they would be smacked. In fact, in many countries in the world, people are still pro-smacking. Teachers can smack the kids with no moral issue.
Mental health for kids before 2000 was much worse... to be generous to the older generations.
I can see how a tablet optimized for logic puzzles, e-books, drawing etc. could be highly beneficial but these adverts seem focused on the child's relationship with the tablet. I think an art/puzzle machine is a much healthier starting point than an everything machine.
Using gen ai so I have been able to make bite size mini games for my son to learn letters and numbers. Today he said skeletons are just pretend given we’ve been walking around looking at Halloween decorations. So I’ve had to explain that skeletons are real and they’re inside all of us. So in these mini games, now I’ve added a 3-D rendering of the body for kids to show the skeleton and muscles and what a human body looks like. And I was able to walk them through it and explain it to him and he’s been very excited about the fact that now there’s this he understands there’s a skeleton inside of him. All that is to say, I think curated parent led experiences with technology are still a great way to teach, and we can’t just hand them an iPad and say here’s some shows to calm you down
This is nice that you're walking them through it but I wonder why you'd need a tablet in the first place, then? It's better to sit with them in front of a monitor with the proper posture and viewing position.
I think that once parents become the OS devs specifically for their own children (or at least app devs) the tablet becomes less like a pacifier and more like a ball game between the toddler and parent, as each throws new stuff (metaphorically) at the other.
I usually try not to judge, people have family, commitments, gotta put food on the table. But. I genuinely wonder how people working at some of these companies that actively make the world a worse place live with themselves. This is basically, and obviously, child abuse in the implied usage. Someone might make a tablet good for education, but I don't think Amazon is structurally capable of doing it.
A few years ago this would have made the perfect April Fools joke.
(Continue down below for an amusing rant - trigger warning maybe?)
Now it’s just part of insatiable corporate greed and the current sad reality.
I wonder if Zuck lets his girls use Instagram all day long or if Andy would gift his own toddler (if he had another one) this beautiful tablet. Probably not, he’d have a full time nanny to keep the kid busy.
Alas, these folks are the symptoms and the real problem is systemic folks. Companies are chasing targets to please…drumroll…the shareholders. Yes, each one of us holding index funds are also culpable. It’s a SNAFU. We’ve been sucked whole into the system and escape is hard (especially with the newly proposed Dell bank account for kids that can only be used to invest in stocks).
That's exactly correct, The idea in itself isn't bad.
Amazon doing it will make it really horrible.
Unless this is 100 open source and ad/telemetry free? Right..
It's not obviously child abuse. If you go back 100 years old children were abused far more than we possibly could simply by malnutrition, disease, lack of shelter. Giving them something that may or may not harm them is not obviously child abuse.
> If you go back 100 years old children were abused far more
I don't understand the argument here. 100 Years ago they were abused more, but last year they were abused less. So increasing the dosage of the abuse is ok as long as it doesn't exceed your random benchmark of 100 years ago?
Research has shown there isn't any ambiguity here. Stuff like this isn't good for adults, and is even worse for kids. So yeah, obvious child abuse.
Dunno if poverty (the things you mentioned) counts as abuse. This is closer to giving children cigs, but back then it was not recognized as harmful. Whereas we already know this technology is harmful.
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wow what an endorsement
150 years ago, people used to pacify toddlers with "cordial" containing laudanum, better known as opium.
Today we're still doing the same thing, only the drugs hit is being delivered by other means.
Neoliberalism is at a state where moral shaming has very little effect. If you shame someone for trying to build a career or better themselves, you are the problem to a bigger extent than the person doing the previously morally bad thing. People's shame in a neoliberalist society comes from personal failures, such as not working hard enough, eating too much, not looking good enough, etc.
Have you considered that they are making the the world better and your process of measuring is flawed.
> I genuinely wonder how people working at some of these companies that actively make the world a worse place live with themselves. This is basically, and obviously, child abuse in the implied usage.
My guess: there are a lot more narcissists and sociopaths out there than you'd guess, and they bully the rest into submission.
Marx explained how the division of labor alienates people from what they produce, from the act of production itself, from their human nature, and from one another. People are forced to perform mind-numbing, degrading, or *harmful tasks* simply to earn the wages needed to stay alive, reducing human life to a commodity
Marx was also an adulterer and refused to take responsibility for children he fathered so I don't think he's the best person to listen to in this situation.
If not Amazon, someone else would ship this. At least if you ship it you can make it less shitty
Right, because it's profitable.
There are lots of wildly profitable enterprises that we regulate or make illegal.
If everyone else is selling boiled orphan elixir, you'd be leaving money on the table not to boil yourself some orphans. But maybe we decide that boiling orphans isn't an industry we want as a society, and legislate consequences for doing so.
> If not Amazon, someone else would ship this. At least if you ship it you can make it less shitty.
I'm sure someone's thinking that, and it's a bullshit rationalization. Don't turn yourself into a villain because you think someone else might beat you to it.
Also, if true, it's a stark indictment of capitalism, and how it pushes people towards malign and harmful activities.
This line of argument is popular bullshit.
Technology is not linear. There are many paths it can take.
Your contributions are somewhat unique. To a certain degree, if you don't make it, no one will.
The sad part is that parents want this. They lack the skills, time, and/or motivation to entertain their kids in any other way. Its easier to just stick a screen in the child's face to avoid the difficulties of parenting.
Get kids an old computer. They prefer something big they can see, with switches that make a resounding clunk, and drives that make clanking noises.
To a kid, playing games from the 1980s off a floppy disk is not a significantly difficult experience than using the very latest technology, but I suspect the former is far better for their developing brains.
Meanwhile, you can get them to learn how to type on the keyboard and learn the basics of needing to type in commands to make the computer do something, which is a lifelong skill - tapping icons on a tablet is not.
Cool idea. Where would I get one?
In this case I gave them a COMPAQ Portable III I rescued from my father-in-law's computer repair shop.
Just a start.
https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=dell+pentium+ii+mid+tow...
myroom.isfine.org on a pinch. I tried to make everything as authentically annoying as it was, having to rewind tapes shapes character
Look up the Pocket 386.
Don't give kids a computer, give them a camera. A real one.
A toddler needs manipulative toys to develop patience and motor control. Blocks to stack, puzzles to fit together, balls to throw and catch, books with pages to turn. Nothing electronic at all.
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I did that and now they want me to buy film for it, which costs a small fortune. And would be even harder to find someone to develop.
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This feels somewhere between an Onion article and one of those vintage ads for giving children cocaine.
I was thinking about what a great commentary Toy Story 5 was on this topic. I'm surprised Amazon didn't call their tablet a Lily Pad.
I recently watched Toy Story 5 on a long flight. I almost felt it should come with a trigger warning - I thought it was a spot on, brilliant yet inherently depressing commentary on our current relationship with tech.
(Minor spoiler alert) One of my favorite scenes was when a slew of toys were running through a house with a family inside. Normally in the Toy Story world when a human see the toys they need to "play dead", but since all the humans were glued to their screens they could run by unimpeded.
… until your get to the political messages further down.
Closer to the coke, unfortunately
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No we don't, and propagating this myth is damaging to people suffering that need that medication.
Many medications behave extremely differently under different dosages, delivery methods and variants.
To quote an ex of mine who was a school psychiatrist, "oh, ADHD meds are addictive are they? I wish someone would tell that to my kids who keep on forgetting to take them."
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I'm not a parent, but don't parents give their kids tablets all the time? The number of toddlers I've seen walking around with tablets glued to their faces makes me uncomfortable, but they're actually just ipads or android tablets. This product seems to me like just another tablet, with a slightly different build for kids.
I'd guess any parent who is already planning on giving their kid a tablet would get this but any parent who is against it will not? I'm not sure this product in isolation increases the number of tablet viewing toddlers.
If you’re not a parent, you're probably only seeing children in places which are not designed with children in mind - places where there’s no place to run and play, and kids have to be quiet. In those places you have to pacify child somehow, a lot of parents use digital entertainment. If you go to child friendly places, you would see it much less.
Our child has maybe 1 hour of tv a week, but if someone sees them only on a plane, they would guess it’s an iPad kid.
IMO even parents who use digital devices to pacify their children know they are making bad choices, but just choose to anyway out of convenience. This choice mirrors a lot which adults have to make these days, and fighting convenience requires strong will and sticking to principles. This is not something which comes naturally or easily to humans unfortunately.
My kids liked to watch Dora the Explorer and Sesame Street (before the age of YouTube). They had to catch it when it was on and when it was over, that was it. They had to go find something else to do. The scarcity made my job as parent a lot easier.
> bad choices
As one of them, no, not really.
I looked hard into the question but all the litterature I got was a mix of "I'll give you candy if you do X" experiments that beg the obvious "what if the kid doesn't want the candy for whatever reason ?", including their mood while doing the experiment. And this goes on for every detail of the experiments.
And the rest was philosophical and hypothetical "it's not like the olden days" style of conservatism, mixed with "this time it's different" to try to barrage criticism.
Testing on kids is just hard, so coming up with good experiments is in itself a PITA. I wish people would recognize that and take the research with shovels of salt (and I don't see misleading research as better than nothing).
Buying a kindle for my kid has been a decision that still pays dividends, I would have kicked myself if I refused it on social pressure.
Would you really compare a Kindle to a full fledged tablet with endless video and addictive games? I think you are being hard on yourself.
It's also a slippery slope. And a function of our society. We went in with the best of intentions and I'm now letting my toddlers watch 30 or 40 minutes of TV a day. It started with one quick work meeting that I couldn't reschedule or skip. Then they started asking for it, demanding it really. It has taken incredibly strong will to limit their watching to 30 or 40 minutes in the early morning.
I’ve built Tellybox to specifically control what and how long my kids can watch anything.
It has a visual indicator (sun going down) that tells them how long they have remaining and that works quite well to remove any discussions (well… screaming and shouting)
https://github.com/sandermvanvliet/tellybox
As others have said in adjacent threads, kids are hard, every situation is different.
I dont have kids (but may in the future) and one thing I'd like to do before then is get a NAS /plex server and build a kid friendly UI on top of it to keep them off of youtube/netflix/fire tv and greatly limit the content available to them to high quality vetted stuff. Acquiring the content for the server may be its own project in and of itself I admit. I also want to do this for myself too, but I especially want it should I have kids. I'm excited by some of the recent examples of hacking smart TVs too, which seems complimentary.
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This is awesome, great work! I'll be back in a few years ;)
Clearly it's actually your LLM that built it, but still interesting!
It's not as if the kids who get the digital pacifiers are well behaved.
Usually my kids are sitting quietly at the table and playing with their little cars or whatever while some kid is melting down that he ran out of roblox or his game isn't working.
I've literally seen kids that are 9 or 10 act this way in public! Like little babies!
Addiction brings out the worst in people; they're suffering and only become aware -- keenly aware -- between "fixes."
Have you considered that their actions could be a consequence of their continued and prolonged stimulation through digital pacification?
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> On its website, Amazon notes that ads can appear in apps for children whose devices aren’t signed up for the premium subscription.
Giving serious Black Mirror vibes with that. Specifically Common People https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_People_(Black_Mirror)
> “Kids want a real tablet, not a toy,” the Jeff Bezos-founded company said in a press release
An almost verbatim line from Toy Story. Incredible. Only the main character was quite a bit older than 3.
I have a rule for gifts for my kids: no screens. Toys are so much more interesting than screens. They'll prob end up staring at screens their whole lives for work.
When I was a kid I had a toy robot that you could input a path into and it'd walk the path. Is that out of bounds for you?
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Screens are horrible. I am absolutely not on the side of screens in general and Amazon deserves this attack. But please don't comment to complain about bad parenting if you haven't had kids or had 1 or 2 neuro typical, easy kids and a wife who did most of the parenting. You really don't know. Really.
I don't know why anybody cares about this. If anyone's ever used an Amazon tablet, you'll know that the battery lasts 5 seconds, the animations are chunky, it's bloteful of ads and basically doesn't work. Save yourself some time and get an iPad. I have multiple times.
Jeff Bezos, our neighborhood crack lord. Thanks Jeff!
this is what the future will look like if the epstein-class wins: https://www.instagram.com/p/Dez_ma0xagT/?hl=en
Hah! I'm stoked for the premium oxygen sub with fewer commercials
This reminds me of the Kid Beer sketch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FepbNahnsE4
The discourse on tablets for kids tends to degenerate into a very judgy, black-and-white debate of so-called “tablet kids” vs… not, which I find really reductive.
Tolerance of tablet use is a spectrum ranging from the aggressively Luddite tech elite shielding their children from their own creation all the way to the 6-year-old posted up in the basin of a grocery cart dual-wielding their ruggedized tablet running Minecraft and their parents’ phone cycling through YouTube slop.
In my experience, most people fall somewhere in the middle, i.e. “we’re on our 4th hour in coach class, I’m tired of pretending this animal-themed card game is fun, and I know this isn’t development-maxing right now but we’re gonna do it for an hour to preserve our sanity and that of those around us”.
That being said, the problem with these ads is that they normalize tablet use as something that’s just another (even desirable!) part of everyday life, not a tool of last resort.
> The discourse on tablets for kids tends to degenerate into a very judgy, black-and-white debate of so-called “tablet kids” vs… not, which I find really reductive.
Some of the kids in my neighborhood derisively called another kid a "tablet kid" because he'd rather stay inside on his tablet than go outside in the summer and play.
Personally, tablet time is reserved for airplanes and trains. We also have a color eink android tablet that is hooked up to Libby and isn't used for anything else but reading.
TV screen time is limited to watching shows together with one of us, or when my son is sick.
Video/computer games are always played together.
Same goes for movies, movies are always co-watched, we sit through the movie, pause and discuss what is going on, I'll ask about why people are doing certain things, what emotions different characters are having in a scene, and so forth.
Somebody should study whether giving a smart device to a toddler increases their chances of getting ADHD diagnosis and medication at later age. Probably the answer is yes.
If shitty parent's don't care about well-being of their children, they could at least consider the cost of future medication, not to even mention likely worse performance in school and job market.
From the article,
> While observing 422 children ages 3 to 5, a 2022 study led by Radesky found that mobile device use for calming — in other words, a digital pacifier — was associated with “decreased executive functioning and increased emotional reactivity.” (Executive function refers to memory and problem-solving skills needed for everyday life. Emotional reactivity refers to poor impulse control in response to stress, pain, and other negative feelings.)
ADHD is a type of executive function disorder.
The study doesn't claim causation. Instead of mobile device use causing executive dysfunction, it is more probable that the correlation is because mobile device use is more effective at calming down a child with poor executive function than a child with typical executive function. That's not to say it's a good way of calming of course.
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Inspired by "Toy Story 5" ... It's amazing how catatonic my 7 year-old can become in a phone or tablet.
> “Kids want a real tablet, not a toy,”
And they have them, like cheap Lenovos and whatnot.
Put AI on it an you have the future of upbringing.
you think this isn't gonna ship with some illegal data harvesting ai? oh sweet summer chile
If you think this is a good idea, please tell my why, happy to discuss.
I have nothing else to say rn.
Edit: Thank you for all the comments. I'm still happy to discuss. I've calmed down a bit, so my responses will be slightly softer.
This is no different to our parents generation that used to tell us to stop watching TV or get off the games console (like a Gameboy). But this is besides the point.
I feel it's great, but then I use Google Kids on the Fire, because Amazon's app is junk in comparison.
And also, my kid is (disabled) autistic and non verbal and this keeps them calm and happy.
So yes it's a great idea.
> This is no different to our parents generation that used to tell us to stop watching TV or get off the games console (like a Gameboy).
Yeah, except for the part where it’s engineered to be as addictive as physiologically possible, it’s exactly the same!
> This is no different to our parents generation that used to tell us to stop watching TV or get off the games console (like a Gameboy)
Yeah, but they were right though?
Honestly, I respect different approaches for disabled kids. Must be very hard, I can't even imagine.
Other than that, movies and games are less destructive than algorithmic feeds, especially short form video. It is preferable to move outside or read a book. But I think we're comparing vegetables to candy to cigarettes.
A loaded question and I feel like people here including yourself are criticizing from the sidelines. Essentially the old "OMG you let your kid play on the phone!!! what a terrible parent!!!!". Although this isn't a phone, it's a device designed for kids with hopefully some apps that have a little more educational value than the typical phone apps.
The talk in this thread indicates absolutely no empathy for dual working parents and just repeats tired talking points. If anyone here looks back on their own childhood perhaps they actually had similar freedoms? Hell i used to play the Apple 2 obsessively from a very young age. I credit it as formative in a positive way.
You can argue that if you're both working and no one has 100% time to dedicate to raising the child they shouldn't have children but that argument leads to plummeting birth rates.
I say all of this as someone who doesn't have kids but I have at least some sense of how freaking hard it is and in the grand scheme of things a tablet designed for kids isn't the worst thing.
Tell me why an alternative that's at least better than a phone is so bad? If you want to argue a phone or any such device that keeps kids occupied for some time is unacceptable i think you're waaaaay out of touch.
> Although this isn't a phone, it's a device designed for kids with hopefully some apps that have a little more educational value than the typical phone apps.
HAHAHA no its not. Amazon Kids+ is an endless stream of product tie in mass market commercial junk content.
The quality has gone down over time (amazingly), curation doesn't exist, and discoverability of the little bit of good content that is there is pretty much impossible.
My wife and I are working parents. This is nightmarish. We know screen kids and they are not good around other people.
Our kids use tech - Nintendo Switch, tv, raspberry pis, and yes, even a tablet for things like train or plane rides. But they absolutely did not get this as a toddler. Yes we were tired. Yes it was hard. Parenting isn't easy.
> The talk in this thread indicates absolutely no empathy for dual working parents and just repeats tired talking points.
I am a dual working parent. We dont own a tablet and our kids never get handed phones. The kids occasionally watch Bluey and Peppa pig on the TV (live not apps).
Your Apple 2 days were very different to the algorithms and feeds of today. Giving a kid a phone loaded up with the Youtube Kids app is literally like feeding them crack.
> criticizing from the sidelines
You dont even have kids, why do you have such a strong opinion on what real parents are saying about bringing up their own? You are the one criticising from the sidelines whilst us parents are making the tough choices in bringing our kids up.
In agreement, and I'push another point:
The dual working parents part is a red herring.
Single working parent families were still busy as hell in many circumstances. Even with a single kid there has always been a social push to control (historically)women's time and make them try hard to be good wives/mothers. I include socializing and engaging with their community to be part of it.
Nobody ever had the time or energy to watch after a kid 24/7 while dealing chores, paperwork, the rest of the family etc.
I am a dual working parent. It is hard. I am not saying zero screen time.
This is still a terrible idea.
I think it's better to give them a movie rather than an algorithmic feed.
> The talk in this thread indicates absolutely no empathy for dual working parents and just repeats tired talking points.
My kids get no more than 10m of tablet time a day each. Both of us are working full time. When they ask for more I point them to their toys/books/etc, or play with them.
So, being dual working doesn’t mean you have to allow your kids to have lots of screen time.
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Parenting before the age of tablets and phones was a thing that seemed to work fairly well overall.
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The problems are tablet and phones. Apps are really bad, even the ones made for kids.
I am sure there are exceptions, but if you are a duo working parents, you don't have time to dig through children apps to figure out which are good.
Overall tv in common space is better (occasionally), you can keep an eye on what the kid is watching and how is affecting their behavior.
You realize when they are done watching tv way earlier than they are (if ever)
The arbitrage will show up when kids raised without screens compete for the same college / job spots as kids raised by screens.
Did you read the article? It clearly references many research projects which show detrimental behaviour, bad temper, and poor attention spans undeniably linked to screen time in under 6s.
doing devil’s advocate here, because it does look like a nightmare.
IF my kids were to have access to a tablet, I would prefer it be a tablet specifically desgined for kids, rather than a commodity all powerful generic computing device and OS
Sudden lightbulb moment:
What about if I just handed my kid a linux machine and put a 30 min cap on YouTube time via the router. (tiktok etc all just banned)
That might go some way to reproducing the kind of friction we experienced growing up with PCs...
Edit could even start with some on-device parenting apps. What about a local LLM powered to classify videos as slop/educational. More power to them if they figure out how to disable it (I'll add more restrictions after a brief honeymoon period)
Do notice that the big all powerful computer doesn't come with games and it's way more complicated to use, challenging the kid from the get-go.
Also they have to learn to use a mouse and a keyboard to do that. You probably forgot how hard it was to learn to use both. Double clicking was really hard for me as a kid
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I've personally tried to do use a tablet in a productive way for the child, and it's all about the apps rather than the tablet itself. Tablets for children (Android knockoffs, essentially) provide what's needed, that is, account controls.
Problem is: there is a limited amount of apps that are genuinely fun and educative. If Amazon wanted really to do something truly educative for children, they'd build a whole market for it, the marketese I see in the article doesn't support that.
You are the parent, you can start at the IF. I'm attacking the premise, not the conclusion.
And I do respect the disclaimer, but lately my experience tells me the devil's advocates help the devil (and I'm an atheist!)
a big tech device/platform designed and algorithmically optimized to hit/increase corporate metrics with small kids as the subjects... hard to imagine anything more dystopian
maybe it'll help us raise good docile consumers and workers tho /s
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The original comment invites discussion, yours is just a pointless sarcastic response and will most likely be flagged or killed for being as such.
I see your points, and I kind of agree. I'm trying to express outrage.
> If you think this is a bad idea, please tell me why, happy to discuss.
There are several reasons. The most important one is that children (ab)using highly stimulating devices don't learn to be absorbed by or find reward in less stimulating ones (most importantly, books). It's exactly the same risk as giving addictive drugs to adults.
This is not theory. Just look at children whose parents give them mobile phones/tablets as pacifiers - they become easily restless.
The intellectual argument is also important. Gamified learning is nice on paper, but one can imagine what children are actually going to play.
Related to another post: the difference between a child and an adult who plays videogames is that the latter has (hopefully!) learned "slow" skills, so they can choose pastimes like this deliberately.
Having said that, I'm for forbidding children from using this type of thing, but it's a very dangerous slippery slope, and there's lots to work on before that step.
Demand for products comes from the consumer, not the producer. This trend happened a long time ago, with parents giving their kids a tablet to avoid actually parenting.
Maybe it's making the best of bad parents
Not always. AI is being pushed on plenty of people. Let's just say that not all products serve consumers and there's room for regulation.
Even if I want to buy uranium, I shouldn't. And if I want to buy a chair, I shouldn't be seeing only uranium chairs.
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This is also a great argument for low-tar cigarettes for children.
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I thought that people don't know what they want until you show it to them? They thought they wanted faster horsies but Amazon gave them noxious cars?
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They're going to use a device anyways because mom or dad are going to want to avoid parenting. Might as well give them something designed for them.
That's no reason to design devices that enable this parent behaviour. We should move in the other direction. Shaming parents who overly rely on giving kids devices for adults can be somewhat effective.
I know there's no hard leverage.
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Enabling the avoidance of parenting incentivizes parents who would otherwise be parenting to also avoid parenting. I agree with OP, hard to see how this is a good thing.
> “Kids want a real tablet, not a toy,” the Jeff Bezos-founded company said in a press release announcing its Amazon Kids Tablets.
Kids don't fucking know the difference you dirty fucks.
Amazon going full Facebook-at-their-worst. Nice to know.
I'm going off on a big tangent here, but hear me out (or ignore me entirely because there's political content, but in a practical context - I think). Humans don't need much of an excuse to reach for an easy answer, and parenting on its own is probably one of the most difficult undertakings in the human experience. "Modern life" is becoming increasingly complex to navigate, we are bombarded with attention sucking ... everything, giving us the sense that time is so scarce that the easiest, most immediate answer is the only option. This is being made true as much for parenting - give them the electronic device - as it is for work problems - MVP, band-aid, temporary becomes permanent.
Amazon product and marketing is an accelerant of this. Encouragement of the ever decreasing time frame of what is already ridiculous short-termism. Amazon are obviously not alone in this, but neither are they working against it or wanting to leave any possible addiction-money profit on the table. This is one of the reasons I'm obsessed with blocking advertising. The more they can convince you of the importance of "all the things" the more of their things you need to buy to create more time for yourself - at the expense of your child. Nice, Jeff. Nice.
On the quality of parenting: My children's grandparents, on both sides of the family, have been a great help. I guess we've been lucky in having them available, but also (maybe accidentally) smart in not moving away from the local support network of family in order to pursue better/bigger/higher-income careers. Where this relates to the above is that, the pace of life, in combination with having children, almost requires a family support network, more specifically grandparents since they're likely retired or in the twilight of their careers and therefore have more time flexibility. Something that's become increasingly obvious to me is the 'life' advantage bestowed upon those with a local family support network over those without. This is something that often puts migrants well behind locals where my anecdotal-only example is someone I used to work with who had three kids but no extended family, and therefore school drop-offs, pick-ups, doctor's appointments and all the other general activities and emergencies that go with having kids is spread out over two people (mum and dad) rather than a full extended family network.
The point I'm trying to make is that this marketing of electronic pacifiers to parents is a symptom of the (unsustainable) increasing 'urgency' of the pace of modern life, which can be made manageable with a decent extended family support network. The advantages of which are compounding.
Something I heard that really stuck with me was: Children form most of their behavioural patterns by the age of three (or maybe it was 5), and so those early years are the most important in shaping them. It requires less work to get something right the first time, than having to fix something that's broken. This isn't to say things can't go wrong, but what it means is to do your best for those years to have a chance at being able to reclaim more of yourself at a later stage.
Ultimately, if you "just give them the tablet" now, you'll be "just giving them the tablet" for the rest of your life.
/ridiculously tangential rant (just had to get some of the thoughts written down to see how they turned out)
I’m with you 100% on obsessively blocking ads. I cringe whenever I accidentally see one in someone else’s house. They’re just so transparently playing on our insecurities…keep that particular mind virus away from me. I buy as little as possible and I’m quite content with it, thank you very much.
My kids must be losers - they still like books.
They might be because they don't get to build the muscle around how to control themselves in front of addictive software. It's an important skill to develop.
"My kids still like books" = "I'm not teaching them how to control themselves in front of addictive software"?
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Don't worry, Amazon still sells books
Written by LLMs and your kid will be the first human to ever read them?
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It's funny how those same billionaires who sell these devices, do not give their children devices until the age of 14.
PS to parents: give your child a toy or a book not a tablet ffs.
I agree for age of 3-6 years, but until age 14 is ridiculous.
Not all devices are equally bad.
I've been happily learning to code my own video games on Intel 486 PC in QuickBasic since late elementary school (age 10), and yes, I played outdoors with other kids too.
Before I had PC of my own, I was making them on paper (game design and mechanics, not literal code).
You brought me back to hand-drawing platformer puzzle levels for my fictional game as a kid. Good times.
The difference there is that you had a difficult, meaningful, constructive experience instead of one designed to just addict you. Even though both were running on von Neumann machines.
Another thing to blame on the billionaires then. Soon they will become like gods, feared and blamed for intentionally causing plagues and famines when people dont appease them enough.
They certainly have more affect on our lives than any "traditional" god. Apparently, reducing their tax exposure brings 10 years of good harvest.
It's kind of gross that people think the screens for kids phenomenon is "avoid parenting" — a two working parent household has very little time for anything and it's incredibly stressful (good luck if you're a single parent).
Yeah sometimes you want your kid to not scream the whole time in the car or on a 6 hour flight where everyone will hate you. My 4 year old niece once screamed for the entirety of a 30 minute car ride because she didn't like what color socks she was wearing, you can't talk yourself out of these absurd situations sometimes and distractions help. I'd love to give a book in these situations, but half the time it just gets thrown at your head.
Why does no one say "parents need more time and space" or "parents need help making effective choices in a world that constantly demands more of them" everyone loves crawling out of the woodwork to tell you how horrible you are.
So, they screamed for 30 minutes. They're kids. I'm not gonna give my 4 or 6 year-old something that's gonna take a hatchet to their attention span just because they're doing a thing that's completely normal for that age.
That drive fucking sucks ass, don't get me wrong, but oh well, that's part of life - the kid has to learn that sometimes shit's not gonna go their way and they have to figure out how to get over it. I'll be damned if I'm gonna teach them that the way they can calm themselves down and regulate their emotions is by the sweet, sweet blue hue of a tablet.
We're a two working parent household and we keep screen time limited to a short amount of TV time. We'll expose them to screens more and more so that we can properly educate them over time, sure. But man, I don't get the whole, "even a two working parent household barely has time for anything and is stressful," bit because - yeah, that's exactly what parenting is.
Parenting is hard. It's exhausting. If you don't have a village, the onus is on you to do it right. That's what we've signed up for, is giving our all to our kids until they're out on their own. That's what we're supposed to do. It's not supposed to be easy, it's a constant stress the likes of which you will never know until you're in it. But we're here, so let's do the hard work and do it right. We owe it to them.
Edit: You're right, we need time and space and the ability to make good choices, but neither of those should come at the expense of my kids.
I wish people should just avoid talking about using tablets on flights altogether.
It's a non-issue. Toddlers/kids maybe fly once a month max. Using tablets during that time is negligible.
How much of screaming kids, is bad parenting? None of the kids in dual working parent, or single parent households that I grew up with, screamed.
Yeah because each kid is different? Kids are not factory products that you can just quality control. Germany even has a law specifically allowing kid noises[0].
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/aug/16/germany-childr...
Probably not much.
have you spent any significant time with a child under 6
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My kids are far from perfect angels, but they do just fine on a 5 hour flight with some colouring books, a small container of legos (with pieces pre-chosen to be ones we're okay with losing), and then the excitement of getting to order ANY drink they want (from their point of view).
I have 3 kids and it has dramatically changed my world view. They are all very different, despite being raised exactly the same. 1 or maybe 2 would do fine for 5 hours with colouring books and legos. The third absolutely would not. We still limit screen time to almost nothing so I'm not necessarily arguing with your overall point. But my honest reaction to comments like this or, worse, from people who aren't parents, is you really don't know. I'm not a single parent but, yea, imagine raising multiple kids who aren't as easy as yours on your own.
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Did you try "the car won't go until you're quiet"?
They were on the way to the dentist
Not sure why you’re getting so strongly downvoted. The travel situations are the ones I find the most reasonable for tablet use. It’s definitely possible to keep a kid occupied for a 5 hour plane ride without a tablet but it takes work. Very few adults can raw-dog a 5 hour plane ride themselves, ffs. I may judge other parents for allowing tablet use in other situations, but not on an airplane.
I wonder what parents did for thousands of years before screens came along.
They smacked their children. Not sure if we want to go there.
If a kid made a scene in public back in 1950, they would be smacked. In fact, in many countries in the world, people are still pro-smacking. Teachers can smack the kids with no moral issue.
Mental health for kids before 2000 was much worse... to be generous to the older generations.
spent significantly more time at home and with their community, "it takes a village" isn't just a cute phrase
kids also roamed on their own quite a lot more with other kids
i bought an amazon tablet one time. it was absolutely terrible.
Warm take: a fantastic daily driver for adults as the intended market of the device means all activity on it is a priori subject to COPPA.
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> One product design that concerned me was the handle — like it’s intended to be carried around like a briefcase
Has the extra benefit of getting them ready for the workforce. /s
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Adult video game player here, happy to discuss why you think that's a problem.
Worse, as these are key developmental years for children, who themselves are not yet equipped to responsible decisions for themselves.
It is a vicious cycle.
Why does this attitude still exist?
And what kind of entertainment do you enjoy in your 30s and 40s?
Worse. The adults have to take the responsibility. The children need to learn first what is and isn't right.
Who is going to teach them?
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Flag me because it’s only acceptable to judge “those kind” of parents. Your decisions are valid and above reproach.
I can see how a tablet optimized for logic puzzles, e-books, drawing etc. could be highly beneficial but these adverts seem focused on the child's relationship with the tablet. I think an art/puzzle machine is a much healthier starting point than an everything machine.
Using gen ai so I have been able to make bite size mini games for my son to learn letters and numbers. Today he said skeletons are just pretend given we’ve been walking around looking at Halloween decorations. So I’ve had to explain that skeletons are real and they’re inside all of us. So in these mini games, now I’ve added a 3-D rendering of the body for kids to show the skeleton and muscles and what a human body looks like. And I was able to walk them through it and explain it to him and he’s been very excited about the fact that now there’s this he understands there’s a skeleton inside of him. All that is to say, I think curated parent led experiences with technology are still a great way to teach, and we can’t just hand them an iPad and say here’s some shows to calm you down
This is nice that you're walking them through it but I wonder why you'd need a tablet in the first place, then? It's better to sit with them in front of a monitor with the proper posture and viewing position.
I think that once parents become the OS devs specifically for their own children (or at least app devs) the tablet becomes less like a pacifier and more like a ball game between the toddler and parent, as each throws new stuff (metaphorically) at the other.
Nice, you're managing a curriculum now.