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One of the things i dislike about the anti screen thing, is that they treat watching Beauty and the Beast and frigging Cocomelon as the same thing. One has a story, long shots, morals and teachings. The other has saturated colors and sub 1sec shots.

My kids grew up with some screentime (quality material, filtered). No YouTube, no streaming. One is a massive book reader, the other obsessed with crafts and building legos. They, from their own choosing, skip multiple days in row of TV, simply because busy playing together. No drama, no crying, no anger nor fits. They do well in school, are able to focus, sleep well.

Make it so both parents dont have to be gone all fucken day, and then again so that the working one only has to be gone for 4 hours and this problem will resolve. This is a symptom of a society grinded to the bone. Not a technology issue. For all this talk about the kids not a single fucken soul talks about how hustle culture rips families apart too.

Wait, when did we all stop doing the alcoholic baby thing?

They said the exact same thing about TV back in the 50s.

Come on Beatriz, please tell us how to solution to this is age verification and deanonymization of everyone on the internet.

I dunno. People were dumb as shit long before screens.

Why wait？

I have already viewed it that way for at least a few years now.

Wow, raising kids soley on hyperinteractive screens, not ever reading to them, not even potty training them, never exposing them to any kinds of constructive play or even just in person social activity outside of the home, leads to astounding developmental delay?

We've got numbers coming out of the UK now that like a third of kids entering school can't eat or use the bathroom without assistance. Try to scroll on images and pages of paper, have never even encountered a book before.

Yeah, raising your kid on a screen and doing basically nothing else is child neglect.

Lmao the fuck it will. Technology enables you to not have to raise your kid, so the kids won't be alright. Humanity has shown time and time again that we are not capable of handling these issues, we'd rather just kick the ball down the road or ignore it entirely. (See: climate change, rise of right wing fascism, the existence of capitalism, loneliness epidemic, etc.)

Isn't it already? Or am I living in some kind of parenting bubble? No one I know thinks it is ok to let their kids be glued to the screen. There are some parents (usually understandably exhausted single parents with multiple children under 6) who do put on kids music on youtube just so that they can tackle some acute problem or have a 10 minute break but otherwise no one thinks screens are great or even ok. It's used as a last resort mostly. Isn't that the norm? At least this is my experience for kids under 6.

The problem isn't necessarily the screens. These screens are a portal into the entire collective knowledge of humanity, after all. There is so much information that, as recently as 30 years ago, was impossible for anyone outside small niches to access, which is now available in just a few seconds. It is nothing less than democratizing information. And connections between people have also gotten a lot easier. We take for granted now that we can talk with anyone in the world, at any time.

However, it's the social media that these screens enable that is the problem, because they take the agency away from people. Inquisitive minds are no longer seeking out relevant information, they passively sit back and let the information come to them. Social Media sites hold engagement as their only value (just as TV media did before), and will shove absolutely anything in someone's face to get them to keep scrolling. It doesn't matter whether the content is enraging, uplifting, or even true: if it grabs someone attention long enough to see the ad, it is successful in their eyes.

We haven't really put many restrictions on our kids' screen time. (And how can I? I make my living looking at screens all day). But from the beginning, we have made sure our kids understand that we want them seeking content out, not passively consuming it. While the kids were younger, we only gave them access to social media like YouTube in a shared area, where we could see what they were watching and searching for, and watched with them. We curated their own mental algorithms, and if they stumbled on something we didn't want them to see, we explained why. I can't say they never succumb to brainrot, but they do seem to have developed the critical thinking skills that their peers have missed out on. (In other words, they know it's brainrot when they see it, even if they watch anyway!)

She's got it backwards: with the likes of RFK Jr in charge, dipping your entire child in alcohol will be deemed as harmless as using Facebook was before we knew better.

Making fun of fascists aside, there's nothing inherently wrong with "screens" and oversimplifying the world into "screens" and "not screens" will harm children MUCH more than help them.

ESPECIALLY in the case of neuroatypical children whose burdens can be significantly lessened with smart use of technology or catastrophically multiplied by treating screens as harmful things to avoid when possible.

In the same light as....come again?

Did people used to do this? ...But considering they straight up gave cocaine to babies in the turn of the last century I'm not that surprised.

In the future, they'll wonder how awful we must have been to use education as a weapon to make Sociopathic Oligarchs wealthier.