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.
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!
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.
Alas, you've received downvotes even though the substance of what you say is valid.
I'll say it's misguided, as well as the root comment to which you're reaponding. The particular study soesnmt show causation, but there's a growing bidy of research that does (it's easy to find).
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.
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.
> 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.
At least you acknowledge some screen time unlike the puritans we have in this thread but i also suspect you're not in the most extreme of difficult parenting situations.
My wife and I sent our son to a remote "boarding school" type school near where we live in Japan. No phones or electronics beyond an mp3 player are allowed. We're so lucky it is cheap and readily available here.
The school's policy isn't necessarily from a "phones bad mmmkay?" perspective, but from a "our ancestors had to figure stuff out for themselves, let's foster that" perspective.
It's true and it's also true that parent's would be criticized from the sidelines for allowing kids, even from a very young age to sit in front of screens for hours on end when i was a kid.
I have a friend who didn't have a television until the age of 12. If you ask which kids turned out well adjusted and which didn't it wasn't the one's with no screen time anymore than the one's with unlimited screen time. There's some reality to life people here aren't accepting and i can't see an issue with some level of hands off parenting that this enables quite honestly.
I know people are going to attack with some extreme of "you allow your kid to be raised by a tablet" or some such but these views are all so tiresome. The reality is that majority of kids have always been allowed some form of screen time and todays screentime is going to at least be more interactive than yesterdays screentime.
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
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
Maybe desktop computers? But touch computers have been designed to be dead simple to use, I don't think jobs had uniquely designed the iphone to be simple enough for a child to use, but he did design it to be usable by people from other countries and cultures with no previous training, children being able to use these touch devices is at least a side effect.
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.
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.
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.
I mean uranium can be a hazard to people around you, so I don't think that's an equivalent scenario.
Drugs could be a good analogy as it (mostly) affects yourself. A safe route for people to buy those would fix the #1 leading cause of death of young adults in the US today (fentanyl)
Amusingly, I totally bought Uranium off of Amazon ~7 years ago when I wanted to test my Geiger counter. Doesn't seem to be available anymore though? Sad!
The demand was for transportation, not any specific product.
Amazon's target market here, wants to parent their kids without parenting their kids. Whether that's a TV with cartoons 20 years ago, a tablet 5 years ago, or a "digital pacifier" today nothing has changed. It's just being fulfilled differently.
My point is that the responsibility is on parents, not companies who will inevitably get the blame and nothing will change. See the other commenter here who said their kids don't even own a tablet.
The existence of them, yeah. I don't think it's so clear cut that it'd be a net increase in harm. Advertising I'm not so sure about, but as for the mere existence of them:
Group A is going to smoke regardless, having a healthier product reduces harm
Group B is never going to smoke no matter what's on offer
The net harm result really only changes because the scope and numbers differ. I don't think I've ever met anyone who actually allows their kids to smoke, I see a lot who give them tablets though.
If we instead imagine a world where parents allowed, even encouraged 60% of children to smoke, and there was no clear route to outright stopping them, giving them at least a better alternative that doesn't hurt them as much would be worth considering
I don't see what banning it actually accomplishes unless we totally ban tablets altogether. From the way I see it, it's the parents who are choosing to give their kids tablets in order to make their own parenting job easier. Am I wrong there? What do you ban to stop that happening?
This is basically the needle exchange argument. Except instead of just needles, you just want to hand out the drug.
I agree that if a parent is dead-set on giving their kid endless screen time, tobacco, or heroin, they will find a way to do it. But the tobacco story demonstrates there are many interventions that can significantly decrease the net amount of abuse. If you want to take a public health argument, do it honestly.
I don't really think looking at it through the lens of tobacco works. Parents giving their children tobacco and heroin aren't a thing. In reality many are self-motivated to give them a tablet for their own benefit, nothing much to do with the kid
Screens or tablets aren't the harmful drug in this situation, they're the needle. A needle that can contain medicine or heroin. The harm is from specific apps and social media. A device can be locked down. You can control what it's able to do and how much. I've used screens to teach myself a language to fluency, a hell of a lot about software development, and countless other things.
Would you object to a tablet that could only access Khan Academy, Openstax and Udemy? What about if we added on a 20 minute allowance of social media? I haven't looked super deep into the Amazon device much but it seems this is the direction they're heading with the parental dashboard
"Educational content has to come first. Your child completes reading or learning goals in Kids+ and educational apps before entertainment apps unlock"
I mean obviously kids are going to try to game the system to get to what they want.. but it seems like a reasonable path to test, and it doesn't require trying to turn every bad parent into a good one, or do something outlandish like ban tablets
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.
Stop marketing to them to kids or normalizing kids using them?
This is really not that hard. Modern app culture is highly addictive and provably poison for our brains over time. Adults can choose poison if they wish but when they give it to their kids it is called child abuse.
Regarding my kids: high priority, wide/curated choice (not in terms of restriction, but in terms of actively finding things they may like), accompanied learning, and, crucially, starting from a very young age. It's pretty much standard parenting, that is, one gets out what one puts in.
By the time children start to pressure for this type of devices (say, 10/12), they will have learned to enjoy books and more creative activities.
I am in the same boat as you, my kids have never had screens. However I do wonder that if by not teaching them to use tech sparingly at a young age, will they just fall down that hole at an older age when they are young adults?
Mobile devices and social media does not get less addictive as you get older, otherwise anybody over about 30 right now would never have any issues with it. Therefore I worry its entirely possible to bring your children up completely avoiding the downfalls of screentime, but then set them up to fall later because they havent developed the guards against it or even havent 'got it out of their system' so to speak.
Our kid has certainly not had access to tablets/phones the first years of her life and only rarely until she was 9 or 10 or so. We have also banned phones from the dinner table, etc. from the beginning.
Parenting takes time and focus. Putting 0-6 years olds behind a tablet screen is just absolving yourself from your responsibility as a parent. Some TV time can be ok after 3 years or so, but you have to time it strictly (so that it does not become a convenience) and exclude some types of cartoons [1].
What? My kids have never ever had a screen of their own. They sit still in restaurants and flights like well parented kids have for decades. Anyone who thinks screens are required for bringing up children is ignoring countless research projects which prove otherwise, and are actively hurting their childrens development.
When has telling people to not have kids ever resulted in said people not having kids? It's a part of our instincts and biology and really really easy to do.
We have to deal with the fact a lot of people produce kids they do not want or regret having. That's reality.
What bothers me the most is targeting children. I see why we need to make axes or chemicals. But these come with disclaimers and labels as well as common sense that they are harmful.
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.
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).
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.
At one point, everyone has to take responsibility for their own life. If we take the US limit of being underage until 21, then at 42 a person is an adult for the same amount of time. Plenty opportunities to figure it out.
An almost verbatim line from Toy Story. Incredible. Only the main character was quite a bit older than 3.
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!
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.)
ADHD is a type of executive function disorder.
I'll say it's misguided, as well as the root comment to which you're reaponding. The particular study soesnmt show causation, but there's a growing bidy of research that does (it's easy to find).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
This is still a terrible idea.
I think it's better to give them a movie rather than an algorithmic feed.
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.
“m” means “meters”.
The school's policy isn't necessarily from a "phones bad mmmkay?" perspective, but from a "our ancestors had to figure stuff out for themselves, let's foster that" perspective.
I have a friend who didn't have a television until the age of 12. If you ask which kids turned out well adjusted and which didn't it wasn't the one's with no screen time anymore than the one's with unlimited screen time. There's some reality to life people here aren't accepting and i can't see an issue with some level of hands off parenting that this enables quite honestly.
I know people are going to attack with some extreme of "you allow your kid to be raised by a tablet" or some such but these views are all so tiresome. The reality is that majority of kids have always been allowed some form of screen time and todays screentime is going to at least be more interactive than yesterdays screentime.
Your very point about them being more interactive is what makes them much more dangerous.
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
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
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.
And I do respect the disclaimer, but lately my experience tells me the devil's advocates help the devil (and I'm an atheist!)
maybe it'll help us raise good docile consumers and workers tho /s
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.
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.
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.
Maybe it's making the best of bad parents
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.
Drugs could be a good analogy as it (mostly) affects yourself. A safe route for people to buy those would fix the #1 leading cause of death of young adults in the US today (fentanyl)
Amazon's target market here, wants to parent their kids without parenting their kids. Whether that's a TV with cartoons 20 years ago, a tablet 5 years ago, or a "digital pacifier" today nothing has changed. It's just being fulfilled differently.
My point is that the responsibility is on parents, not companies who will inevitably get the blame and nothing will change. See the other commenter here who said their kids don't even own a tablet.
The group of parents who let their kids smoke might get those instead, improving their health
The parents who don't allow it would never consider them
I suppose it depends how many of group 2 could be converted to 1 if they were "low tar!".. my intuition is close to zero
Group A is going to smoke regardless, having a healthier product reduces harm
Group B is never going to smoke no matter what's on offer
If we instead imagine a world where parents allowed, even encouraged 60% of children to smoke, and there was no clear route to outright stopping them, giving them at least a better alternative that doesn't hurt them as much would be worth considering
I think it's still better to ban these obviously harmful things and to reduce exposure to them as much as possible.
I agree that if a parent is dead-set on giving their kid endless screen time, tobacco, or heroin, they will find a way to do it. But the tobacco story demonstrates there are many interventions that can significantly decrease the net amount of abuse. If you want to take a public health argument, do it honestly.
Screens or tablets aren't the harmful drug in this situation, they're the needle. A needle that can contain medicine or heroin. The harm is from specific apps and social media. A device can be locked down. You can control what it's able to do and how much. I've used screens to teach myself a language to fluency, a hell of a lot about software development, and countless other things.
Would you object to a tablet that could only access Khan Academy, Openstax and Udemy? What about if we added on a 20 minute allowance of social media? I haven't looked super deep into the Amazon device much but it seems this is the direction they're heading with the parental dashboard
"Educational content has to come first. Your child completes reading or learning goals in Kids+ and educational apps before entertainment apps unlock"
I mean obviously kids are going to try to game the system to get to what they want.. but it seems like a reasonable path to test, and it doesn't require trying to turn every bad parent into a good one, or do something outlandish like ban tablets
I know there's no hard leverage.
This is really not that hard. Modern app culture is highly addictive and provably poison for our brains over time. Adults can choose poison if they wish but when they give it to their kids it is called child abuse.
I'd like to hear more about the results you've gotten with this approach. How do you approach is this with your kids?
With my kids, I oversee everything they do (they are under 6). They average 15min daily for two episodes of a kids show.
I'm not saying go to zero. But definitely not over 3 hours and definitely not a dedicated device for them.
Regarding my kids: high priority, wide/curated choice (not in terms of restriction, but in terms of actively finding things they may like), accompanied learning, and, crucially, starting from a very young age. It's pretty much standard parenting, that is, one gets out what one puts in.
By the time children start to pressure for this type of devices (say, 10/12), they will have learned to enjoy books and more creative activities.
Mobile devices and social media does not get less addictive as you get older, otherwise anybody over about 30 right now would never have any issues with it. Therefore I worry its entirely possible to bring your children up completely avoiding the downfalls of screentime, but then set them up to fall later because they havent developed the guards against it or even havent 'got it out of their system' so to speak.
Parenting takes time and focus. Putting 0-6 years olds behind a tablet screen is just absolving yourself from your responsibility as a parent. Some TV time can be ok after 3 years or so, but you have to time it strictly (so that it does not become a convenience) and exclude some types of cartoons [1].
[1] https://thesciencesurvey.com/editorial/2024/07/07/the-proble...
I'm opposed to dedicated devices for children that expose them to the internet.
It's ridiculously hard to restrict all of the harmful content. And frankly, the big tech is less trustworthy by the minute.
If you cannot raise your kids properly, please dont have kids.
We have to deal with the fact a lot of people produce kids they do not want or regret having. That's reality.
I think by having adult devices parents will be more cautious and mindful of what they are granting to their kids.
Not an excuse but an explanation perhaps?
PS to parents: give your child a toy or a book not a tablet ffs.
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).
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.
kids also roamed on their own quite a lot more with other kids
Has the extra benefit of getting them ready for the workforce. /s