Our kids? Hell, my wife and I don't use social media, except in very limited doses for work reasons. Our kids have zero access to it and never will. Their device usage is kept at a minimum and used for mostly educational or quality conversational purposes.
I hate how many people now, whenever we're around them everyone has their phones out scrolling through 30 sec videos. They want to show you things which aren't funny, aren't entertaining, aren't informative... it's damn near Idiocracy levels of content consumption.
[Insert video of someone badly dancing with caption that says "me."]
Personally, I find it bizarre and extremely boring.
Every week since she was about six months old, I've taken my daughter with me to get groceries. She's absolutely fascinated by the grocery store: the rolling cart, the colors and textures of produce ("ta-to!"), the other shoppers, the illustrations on packaging ("bear!"). I hand her items and give her their names. She shakes them, rotates them, repeats their names back to me.
But every time we go, I see at least one child my daughter's age or younger staring mindlessly at a phone or tablet, oblivious to their environment and the parent pushing their cart. It just seems sad.
I used to judge parents who resorted to tablets to keep their children quiet. I don't really anymore. You don't know how exhausted the parents might be or how many hours they've already spent trying to entertain their kids in a more wholesome manner.
I've taken a 2 year old on vacation and some of that time is spent going to unique restaurants that take a couple of hours for a meal. My toddler would get bored and squirmy and would quickly ruin dinner for the entire restaurant. Same thing for airplanes. Of course I don't resort to it immediately but if talking, interacting, and other toys don't do the trick, iPad is a very useful tool in the arsenal. A carefully curated list of educational, offline content is acceptable in my opinion.
Grocery store, or any other short errand? Sure, that's too much.
Since you're getting some responses to this, I'll add to what we started.
It's important to note: I think "judging" parents isn't productive. People don't understand there are an insane amount of variables involved in raising kids, especially day-to-day.
So even though, I agree with you: we have tried since the beginning to raise children who can go to museums, who can read for long hours, etc. On vacations, we always packed a big bag of books, mini-games, etc. This will keep little kids busy for hours.
The BIG part though...
Really, sometimes you simply have to let stuff happen. Part of being a parent is engaging your child when they're frustrated and bored, NOT getting rid of them. It's a HUGE part... walking with them outside to talk through their feelings and your expectations.
Is it a pain in the ass? Absolutely. Is it one of the most valuable things you'll ever do with them? Without question.
I've walked out of plenty of places to deal with my kid being frustrated. And sometimes we're in a restaurant for the first time in months and he's getting bored and antsy after an hour and a half and we'll put up some Bluey on my phone while we finish off desert. You win some, you loose some.
It is possible to do without tablets/phones. It means you can’t do 2 hour dinners for the first 5 years. Always have a parent ready to walk outside.
Once the child is 5 they will sit and talk to you for hours, do puzzles, and play games.
I've seen a wide spectrum in that. There are those that only wheel out the mind-numbing Youtube videos as a last resort, but I have seen other parents where the kid basically never has dinner without staring at a screen.
I took my 1 year old camping this weekend without my wife. I plopped him in the car seat and put on a Ms. Rachel video so that he would be quiet/calm while I packed up the campsite.
I felt a little bad resorting to using a video like that to "control" him, but then I carried him on a 3 mile hike where he spent the whole time looking at the trees, before eventually falling asleep.
I'm hoping that as he grows up I can just teach him to have a healthy relationship with things like social media and use it like anything else for entertainment.
Man, if you don't want to deal with the challenges of children, why have kids? I don't lie to myself, I know I couldn't do it and I didn't.
Maybe you just don't get to go out for dinner or ride on planes until they don't need to be hypnotized with a screen? You know it's bad for them but you're putting your comforts and freedoms above theirs and everybody else's.
I can't help but feel like the next generation has been completely fucked.
I feel like this mindset is part of why so many people are nervous about having kids, and I couldn't disagree with it more.
Your kid is not an optimization problem, they're a part of your family. If you want to do something unique that's going to bore your kids, it's fine to give them something to do; a half hour of screen time while you enjoy that fancy restaurant while traveling is fine. Your kid will be fine.
Sometimes you should put your comforts and freedoms above your kid's. You are not their servant, you are your own person who has your own wants and needs, and those get to win out sometimes. If your kid throws a tantrum when you're in an art museum, yeah, try to discipline them and calm them down and teach them. If you have a rare opportunity to visit a museum you've always wanted to, though, then it's fine to lose a battle or two here or there if the alternative is missing out on unique experiences that you value.
There are sacrifices to being a parent for sure, but the mindset that it's taboo to allow anything to happen that's not immediately in the best long-term developmental interest of your child is mind-boggling to me. Don't raise your kids in front of screens, but being a parent isn't some phase change that means you have to abandon all your interests and dreams and desires; it just means there's one more person whose interests and dreams and desires you have to care about now.
This is not the typical coastal educated elite liberal mindset. The social pressure to treat birth as a permanent phase change (good term) is immense.
If you can't deal with the challenges of being on a plane where someone else's kids are screaming, maybe you just don't get to go on commercial flights. Just charter a jet.
Non-parents always have all the answers about how kids should be raised.
Don’t judge until you’ve been there. Screens are more of a last resort for my family but we do use them. We avoid most activities where kids will bore quickly but it’s impossible to avoid all situations like that.
This is so off-base I don't even know where to begin. "Maybe you just don't get to ... ride on planes" -- so the kids never get to meet their grandparents or great-grandparents who are too unwell to make the trip because you won't give them a screen for an hour or two? Like everything else in life, dealing with screens is a balance. Every day for multiple hours is too much; a couple hours on twice-yearly trips is not going to have any effect on them.
We haven't had to resort to an iPad yet, but I won't rule it out eventually. Especially on a long trip.
However, everyday errands just shouldn't require extended screen time. Children are naturally curious, making it even more surprising when one is glued to a screen instead of investigating their surroundings.
Yeah I don't judge other parents, this stuff is hard.
We do use downloaded stuff on netflix on flights or rarely long drives if we need to keep them awake. But we use colouring, activity books etc on planes before resorting to Netflix.
To be honest, sometimes I feel that if they are on a device too much they just get frustrated and wound up anyway, so you end up shooting yourself in the foot a bit.
Having said that we do let them watch TV at home. If you're parenting alone, sometimes it's the only option to get stuff done.
Yeah don't take a 2-year-old to a dinner like that. Do it later, when they are old enough to sit through it or get a sitter.
It's only a few years when they are this needy. You'll survive without exotic vacations and fancy restaurants for that time.
We live in HK where it's part of the culture to have restaurant meals with family from an early age. We started bringing him weekly around 4 months old. At least our son got quickly used to it and it's the same for a lot of our friends. They can handle 2 hours dinner without tablets...
I think it's culture dependent and maybe the fact that in most cases the food is in shared in the middle of the table makes it more engaging?
People talk about kids being addicted, but I had to deal with my dad constantly showing me some Instagram video. Not necessarily a dumb video, but still not something I cared to watch.
>my wife and I don't use social media, except in very limited doses for work reasons
do you not consider HN to be social media?
Oh ok, I'm glad I'm not the only one who finds those things idiotic, not fun and not useful
These type of people are the people who haven't realized they've been indoctrinated, addicted, and tortured.
They have been induced towards a corruption by dependency scheme in subtle ways, and as a result their rational thought has diminished without them realizing it.
This naturally happens in any totalitarian state where you become dependent on the state for your decisions and values.
Religion in a way used to help protect against this, but with the spread and rise of nihilism and pacifism, religion has taken a back seat especially given the recent controversy and destructive path orthodoxy is taking.
These are the values that are so widely promoted and embedded in things today, following a War and Peace philosophy, which is acceptance of evil, or rather towards inducing a wilful self-inflicted blindness towards evil.
You may find the book "On Resistance to Evil by Force", by Ivan Ilyin, an enlightening read, written around the early 1900s, near the dawn of modern psychology. It discusses the topic of evil, in a objectively tied way (not delusion or mere opinion). It does this in a fairly refined way properly following rational principles, first with definition, and then building from there following Method, and the Hyper-rational practices of that generation. A translation to English only recently became available, it was originally written in Russian prior to and through the Bolshevik/Communist takeover.
There are aspects discussed that you can see were used incompletely in the design of the modern day prison system in the U.S and many other insights.
The book was published to refute War and Peace, since the philosophies written about in that book induce evil over time which follows in line with the Banality of evil (the complacent/slothful) becoming the radical evil (related to the Nazi's, and the Wannsee Conference). A semi-recent movie was produced in 2001, that uses the minutes taken at that conference to depict how it happened (quite excellently, albeit dark). Conspiracy(2001).
The problem with totalitarian regimes is people in these societies will attack those that threaten their belief systems, and that threat might include the imposition of the responsibility of deciding things for themselves.
See these authors for more material on the torture/menticide aspects: They are all experts in their fields, or have been recognized by established experts for the excellence of their published works.
Joost Meerloo, "Rape of the Mind" (1950s) Robert Cialdini, "Influence" (1990s) Robert Lifton, "Thought Reform and the psychology of Totalism" (1950s)