Comment by alt227
16 hours ago
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.
Its a mix.
Some of them think its safe, others think the risk is overblown, and a lot just don't want to deal with their kid having a shit fit.
In the UK, unless you are adopting a kid with needs, you will not get any parenting training. so you're on your own on how to deal with children. TV was safe when I was a kid, and younger parents who grew up with digital TV also had safe watching, why would youtube kids be any different?
With my kids (and yes this is a boast, I'm middle class, this is how we assert dominance) I was lucky enough to be able to enforce time limits of TV/netflix etc. They also aren't allowed youtube on their own, so never got onto the conversion ladder from crap to exploitative crap.
crucially they don't have tablets/phones whilst bored. TV is a treat, so boredom requires them to sit there and fucking day dream like the rest of us.
Parental training has not been the norm in most societies and most times. The problem in the modern west is that people lack the community and family support that helps parents. This combined with other things (lack of time with two parents working full time out of the house being usual, parental addiction to devices, etc).
> TV was safe when I was a kid,
Safe in some ways, but still harmful. it was passive and a substitute for things that helped you develop. A lot of parents (mine included) limited TV for just this reason.
> TV is a treat, so boredom requires them to sit there and fucking day dream like the rest of us.
Exactly this - one of the things I had in mind with regard to TV being harmful. Even in the days when we had three or four broadcast channels and that was it!
> I'm middle class
Worth noting that the British and American definitions of middle class are quite different.
> 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.
> Buying a kindle for my kid has been a decision that still pays dividends
Fair enough. I guess ignoring large swathes of industry research and government warnings must be a good tradeoff for an easier life.
> Fair enough. I guess ignoring large swathes of industry research and government warnings must be a good tradeoff for an easier life.
I have not come across any research saying ebook readers are bad. They are very different from general purpose tablets.
My issue is the quality of the research. IMHO not by fault of the researcher, but because of the subject itself.
The first result that isn't a guideline or call to action when I search "preschool children screen time research"
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S074937972...
On the recruitment:
> Note: Eligible families were recruited primarily through paid social media advertisement (83%) as well as other online sources (6%) and word-of-mouth/other (11%).
So most of this experiment was done with families who click ads on Facebook/Instagram. The results are relevant for that specific public, but tougher to expand to other families and environments.
That's one specific study, but I really read a lot, and this kind of bias is common. Perhaps because they need families that are stressed about screen time in the first place ?
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.
Kindles were the only devices that had a fully locked on ecosystem, yet no device lockin on the parent side (no need to keep an up to date iPhone just for the parental controls for instance)
Nowadays I think I wouldn't mind audio and video, especially audiobooks and channels like those on Nebula. YouTube is a cesspool while also hosting the most interesting content, running something like Newpipe on a kid's tablet with specific channels locked on would also interesting IMHO.
> addictive games
The main issue for me is the lack of management options. ScreenTime is half-assed, what we have on Nintendo's Switch is a bit better, I'd actually spend time to deal with all the settings and rule system if it was available in a very granular way. We're already spending the same amount looking after other stuff.
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.
You don't even have to do it before you have children. You can wait until they are six or so and have the autonomy to pick what they want to watch (under your guidance). For children younger than that, you pick what they watch and when they watch it. Every time.
Do start hoarding the better shows and series you know.
I just threw infuse logged in as "kids" to Jellyfin which has curated kids stuff - and it's all tied to a custom home assistant timer profile that turns jellyfin access off at a particular time; there's a "door lock" in HomeKit that can be used to extent TV time past the normal cutoff if a parent decides, but since it's a door lock "hey Siri" can lock it, but not unlock it.
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!
Yes obviously it did. I have kids and a day job that takes up my time ;-)
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?
I think that’s exactly what the GP was saying
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