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.
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.
Problem is you have to have both parents working because of landlord greed. The potty training part.is how you know it’s not the phones, because you can watch skibidi toilet on the real toilet
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.)
You are half right. We are capable, it’s just not profitable enough so the people who’s bottom line it would affect turn all their efforts into preventing us dealing with it.
Come on Beatriz, please tell us how to solution to this is age verification and deanonymization of everyone on the internet.
I would start with banning kid influencers. No content with underage children on the platforms. You can still create account, view, comment, chat, whatever but to upload videos/photos you have to be an adult. Platforms would have to remove underage content same way they remove porn or violent content. The age would be determined by algorithms (it doesn’t matter how old you really are but what age do you look like). It wouldn’t solve all the issues but it would be a start.
Removed by mod
True that, also the type of screen and what their doing on it matters. For example a kid reading on a kindle or a kobo ia fine in my opinion. Reading Wikipedia or news in an ipad is fine. Scrolling through titktok is not.
Just block dump sites like tiktok and facebook and it will be fine. As long as you monitor the usage it is fine. The problem is parents don’t know how to do it.
Wait, when did we all stop doing the alcoholic baby thing?
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.
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!)
Why wait？
Dip a pacifier near you today!
